Re:Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling
by gbrown on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @10:32AM
(#25518588)
This question would be super bizarre to anyone coming from a stats background.
Others have commented on the role of inference/estimation, and prediction in small data or non-black-box contexts, so I’ll just add that there are deep theoretical reasons to do Bayesian inference. It’s a framework grounded firmly in decision theory, and provides a coherent way to reason about the world. You can prove, under sensible axioms, that beliefs can be described in terms of probability distributions, and that we should update beliefs based on Bayes’ Rule.
Others have commented on the role of inference/estimation, and prediction in small data or non-black-box contexts, so I’ll just add that there are deep theoretical reasons to do Bayesian inference. It’s a framework grounded firmly in decision theory, and provides a coherent way to reason about the world. You can prove, under sensible axioms, that beliefs can be described in terms of probability distributions, and that we should update beliefs based on Bayes’ Rule.