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April, 2014
Overview
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Bayes Theorem: Sally Clark
After the sudden death of two baby sons, Sally Clark (above,
center) was sentenced to life in prison in 1996
Among other errors, expert witness Prof Roy Meadow (above
right) had wrongly interpreted the small probability of two cot
deaths as a small probability of Clarks innocence
After a long campaign, including refutation of Meadows
statistics, Clark was released and cleared in 2003
After being freed, she developed alcoholism and died in 2007
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Bayes Theorem: XKCD at the beach
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Bayes Theorem
Bayes theorem also applies to continuous variables say Systolic
and Diastolic blood pressure;
The conditional densities of the
random variables are related
this way;
f (x)
f (x|y) = f (y|x)
f (y)
...which we can write as
*many people initially think it does; an important job for instructors of intro
Stat/Biostat courses is convincing those people that they are wrong.
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Freqist inference (I know, shoot me!)
Frequentist inference, set all a-quiver;
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Freqist inference (I know, shoot me!)
Lets do some more target practice, for frequentist testing;
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Freqist inference (I know, shoot me!)
Lets do some more target practice, for frequentist testing;
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Freqist inference (I know, shoot me!)
Lets do some more target practice, for frequentist testing;
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Freqist inference (I know, shoot me!)
For testing or estimating, imagine running your experiment again
and again. Or, perhaps, make an argument like this;
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Bayesian inference
[Appalling archery pun goes here]
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Bayesian inference
[Appalling archery pun goes here]
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Bayesian inference
[Appalling archery pun goes here]
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Bayesian inference
[Appalling archery pun goes here]
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Bayesian inference
Heres exactly the same idea, in practice;
prior
likelihood
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posterior
4
Probability density
3
2
1
0
Parameter
Parmer et al (1996,
JNCI) popularized
the definitions, they
are now common in
trials work
Known as Subjunctive Bayes; if one had this prior and the data,
this is the posterior one would have. If one had that prior... etc.
likelihood
prior #1
posterior #1
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prior #2
posterior #2
Probability Density
6
4
2
0
Parameter
These priors (& many more) are dominated by the likelihood, and
they give very similar posteriors i.e. everyone agrees. (Phew!)
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When dont priors matter (much)?
A related idea; try using very flat priors to represent ignorance;
12 likelihood
prior
10
posterior
Probability Density
8
6
4
2
0
Parameter
likelihood
The likelihood alone
prior (yellow) gives the clas-
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posterior
sic 95% confidence in-
Probability Density
^ ^ ^
1.96 stderr + 1.96 stderr credible interval.
Parameter
1.0
0.5
0.0
1 0 1 2 3
^ ^ ^
1.96 stderr + 1.96 stderr
Parameter
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bayesian statistics
http://www.stat.washington.edu/hoff/Book/
http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/18550 Chapter6.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/kenrice/
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