BAYESIAN LEARNING
Applications
• Medical diagnosis: Doctors use Bayesian inference to diagnose
patients by considering their history, lifestyle, and other
factors. Bayesian analysis can also help fill in incomplete medical
records.
• Weather forecasting: Bayesian statistics are used in weather
forecasting.
• Machine learning: Bayesian statistics are used in machine
learning.
• Financial modeling: Bayesian statistics are used in financial
modeling.
Applications
• Search algorithms: Bayesian statistics are used to improve
search algorithms.
• Estimating the probability of rain: Bayes' theorem can be used
to estimate the probability of rain based on the probability of it
being cloudy in the morning and whether it rains later in the
day.
• Updating beliefs: Bayesian thinking can help people update
their beliefs based on new evidence. For example, if you hear a
bad impression of someone from a friend, you should keep an
open mind and gather more evidence before forming a final
opinion.
CASE STUDY
• If you went to test for cancer and the doctor claims that the test is
95% accurate (i.e. out of 100 people with cancer, the test will be
positive for 95 of them and 95 out of 100 people who do not have
cancer with test negative). If you tested positive, does it mean that
there is a 95% chance that you have cancer?
• It is definitely wrong but it is also the conclusion that most people will
jump into if they are tested positive.
• This is where beauty of Bayes’ theorem jumps in, it teaches us to
include our prior (one can think of it as knowledge or context) before
jumping to conclusions (posterior probability). In the case of cancer,
• Prior is knowing the proportion of the entire population who
has cancer.
• Evidence is proportion of the entire population who gets a
positive test.
• Likelihood is probability of testing positive given that you
have cancer.
