Statistics Seminar

3:00 pm

Friday, 6th Oct 2017

W104, Behavioural Sciences Building


Dr Frank Tuyl

(School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, The University of Newcastle)

From Bayes' theorem to Bayesian inference: some simple examples

Starting with Bayes' theorem that "we all agree on", I will argue that the step towards Bayesian inference seems rather small. I will give some simple examples of advantages of Bayesian over classical inference: 1. automatic inclusion of known constraints and 2. straightforward inference for functions of parameters.
Another point I will make is that posterior distributions (of unknown parameters) are often equivalent to sampling distributions (of estimators) required for classical inference. However, when the latter are difficult/impossible to obtain, and Normal approximations are applied, the former tend to be clearly preferable for inference.