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In the context of Bayesian statistics, the posterior probability distribution usually describes the epistemic uncertainty about statistical parameters conditional on a collection of observed data. From a given posterior distribution, various point and interval estimates can be derived, such as the maximum a posteriori (MAP) or the highest ...
The posterior probability of a model depends on the evidence, or marginal likelihood, which reflects the probability that the data is generated by the model, and on the prior belief of the model. When two competing models are a priori considered to be equiprobable, the ratio of their posterior probabilities corresponds to the Bayes factor .
In Bayesian probability theory, if, given a likelihood function (), the posterior distribution is in the same probability distribution family as the prior probability distribution (), the prior and posterior are then called conjugate distributions with respect to that likelihood function and the prior is called a conjugate prior for the likelihood function ().
The posterior distribution should have a non-negligible probability for parameter values in a region around the true value of in the system if the data are sufficiently informative. In this example, the posterior probability mass is evenly split between the values 0.08 and 0.43.
Bayesian-specific workflow stratifies this approach to include three sub-steps: (b)–(i) formalizing prior distributions based on background knowledge and prior elicitation; (b)–(ii) determining the likelihood function based on a nonlinear function ; and (b)–(iii) making a posterior inference. The resulting posterior inference can be used ...
An informative prior expresses specific, definite information about a variable. An example is a prior distribution for the temperature at noon tomorrow. A reasonable approach is to make the prior a normal distribution with expected value equal to today's noontime temperature, with variance equal to the day-to-day variance of atmospheric temperature, or a distribution of the temperature for ...
In a Bayesian setting, this comes up in various contexts: computing the prior or posterior predictive distribution of multiple new observations, and computing the marginal likelihood of observed data (the denominator in Bayes' law). When the distribution of the samples is from the exponential family and the prior distribution is conjugate, the ...
Given a vector of parameters to determine, a prior probability () over those parameters and a likelihood (,) for making observation , given parameter values and an experiment design , the posterior probability can be calculated using Bayes' theorem