What does a probability of zero mean? When people use it in everyday conversations, a statement like "the probability of something is zero" usually implies that that something isn't going to happen. Or that it is impossible to happen. Or … [Continue reading]
In this post, I want to talk about conditional dependence and independence between events. This is an important concept in probability theory and a central concept for graphical models. In my two-part post on Bayesian belief networks, I introduced … [Continue reading]
In the first part of this post, I gave the basic intuition behind Bayesian belief networks (or just Bayesian networks) — what they are, what they're used for, and how information is exchanged between their nodes. In this post, I'm going to show the … [Continue reading]
In my introductory Bayes' theorem post, I used a "rainy day" example to show how information about one event can change the probability of another. In particular, how seeing rainy weather patterns (like dark clouds) increases the probability that it … [Continue reading]
November 7 UPDATE: click here to view our final update post where we give our latest analyses just a day before the election! Click here to go to our daily predictions page. In the first 10 posts I mostly concentrated on … [Continue reading]
What is statistics about? Well, imagine you obtained some data from a particular collection of things. It could be the heights of individuals within a group of people, the weights of cats in a clowder, the number of petals in … [Continue reading]