This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American I’m not sure when I first heard of Bayes’ ...

The stock market is an ever-changing place. In fact, it’s changing every second of every day as prices go up and down, and new factors impact the trajectory of the market. It’s important for investors ...

When two people with strong prior beliefs at opposite ends of the spectrum meet, there is absolutely no way either of them can influence the other. Now think about those prime time discussions on news ...

Having a strong opinion about an issue can make it hard to take in new information about it, or to consider other options when they’re presented. Thankfully, there’s an old rule that can help us avoid ...

Although Bayes's theorem demands a prior that is a probability distribution on the parameter space, the calculus associated with Bayes's theorem sometimes generates sensible procedures from improper ...

Over the years, many writers have implied that statistics can provide almost any result that is convenient at the time. Of course, honest practitioners use statistics in an attempt to quantify the ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. In order for you to exist, a great many unlikely events needed to ...

You're sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the result of a test. The test will tell you whether you have a disease you really don't want to have. As you wait, it seems as if the whole world is ...

Bayes' theorem, also called Bayes' rule or Bayesian theorem, is a mathematical formula used to determine the conditional probability of events. The theorem uses the power of statistics and probability ...

Inside probability theory, conditional probability is a way to calculate and measure the probability of some event happening if another event has already occurred. The Bayes’ Theorem is one way of ...