News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What’s Wrong with Bayes. Parent comment

Re:What’s Wrong with Bayes by btilly on Thursday December 05, 2019 @06:26PM (#21717797)
In Bayes' formula, the absolute probability of the observed outcome does not matter. What matters is the ratio of the observed outcome for a given p to the probability under your prior.

The structure of what might have happened does not affect those ratios. Only what was observed does.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s Wrong with Bayes by pdonis on Friday December 06, 2019 @11:44PM (#21728523)
> The structure of what might have happened does not affect those ratios. Only what was observed does.

This is true in the sense that you only compute conditional probabilities for the data that was actually observed, not data that could have been observed but wasn't.

However, there's more to it than that; I'll post upthread in a moment with more detail.

[ Parent | on HN ]