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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Whether in everyday life or in the lab, we often want to make inferences about hypotheses. Whether I’m deciding it’s safe to run a yellow light, when I need to leave home in order to make it to my ...

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’ ...

In The Theory That Would Not Die, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne tells the surprisingly gripping story of the theorem that pervades modern life FEW single ideas can boast such an impressive résumé. What else ...

In the ever-evolving toolkit of statistical analysis techniques, Bayesian statistics has emerged as a popular and powerful methodology for making decisions from data in the applied sciences. Bayesian ...

Observing, gathering knowledge and making predictions are the foundations of the scientific process. The accuracy of our predictions depends on the quality of our present knowledge and accuracy of our ...