An Intuitive Lesson in Bayesian Methods
February 14, 2014
Looking for a concise explanation of how Bayesian components work? Research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute shares on his website “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem: Bayes’ Theorem for the Curious and Bewildered; an Excruciatingly Gentle Introduction.” The researcher explains why he created and is sharing this explanation:
“While there are a few existing online explanations of Bayes’ Theorem, my experience with trying to introduce people to Bayesian reasoning is that the existing online explanations are too abstract. Bayesian reasoning is very counterintuitive. People do not employ Bayesian reasoning intuitively, find it very difficult to learn Bayesian reasoning when tutored, and rapidly forget Bayesian methods once the tutoring is over. This holds equally true for novice students and highly trained professionals in a field. Bayesian reasoning is apparently one of those things which, like quantum mechanics or the Wason Selection Test, is inherently difficult for humans to grasp with our built-in mental faculties.
“Or so they claim. Here you will find an attempt to offer an intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning – an excruciatingly gentle introduction that invokes all the human ways of grasping numbers, from natural frequencies to spatial visualization.”
Yudkowsky makes his lesson engaging with interactive computation examples, sidebars full of “fun facts,” and java-based, graphic-representation applets. Study this page, and you may become the one colleagues turn to for wisdom on this challenging subject.
Cynthia Murrell, February 14, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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One Response to “An Intuitive Lesson in Bayesian Methods”
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It started out promising, but the first example required me to start remembering basic probability theory, which is buried way back in the beer soaked recesses of thirty year-old neural pathways formed in Engineering Statistics 2102.
Having worked at Autonomy briefly, I sympathies with his desire to prostheletyze the glory of all things Bayes, but the so-called gentle introductions makes a LOT of assumptions up front.
Compound that with the image of women being routinely misdiagnosed for breast cancer is hardly a light hearted romp through statistical reasoning.
I would have liked to have seen some zingers right up front of why Bayes matters without asking me to do math right away. I don’t know about you, but even with an engineering degree, it takes me quite a while to shift from hippie dippy concept land into equation land.
I would love to see an excruciatingly gentle introduction to Bayes Theorem, but this was excruciatingly something else. This may be intended for less casual readers. I could see how it would be helpful if you were in the middle of a statistics course and “Whoa! What’s this Bayesean stuff all about?”