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 ...

We live in a world where a lot of things seem to happen by pure chance, from winning the Lotto to losing your car keys. But the truth is, the likelihood of many everyday things happening is heavily ...

Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University, offers this explanation. A patient goes to see a doctor. The doctor performs a test with 99 percent ...

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 ...

First, we need to estimate the pre-test probability that asymptomatic Massachusetts residents have Covid-19. We know that in the state approximately 2% of all tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that ...

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’ ...

Nate Silver, baseball statistician turned political analyst, gained a lot of attention during the 2012 United States elections when he successfully predicted the outcome of the presidential vote in ...

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 ...