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Prior probability - Wikipedia

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A prior probability distribution of an uncertain quantity, simply called the prior, is its assumed probability distribution before some evidence is taken into account. For example, the prior could be the probability distribution representing the relative proportions of voters who will vote for a particular politician in a future election. The unknown quantity may be a parameter of the model or a latent variable rather than an observable variable. In Bayesian statistics, Bayes' rule prescribes how to update the prior with new information to obtain the posterior probability distribution, which is the conditional distribution of the uncertain quantity given new data. Historically, the choice of priors was often constrained to a conjugate family of a given likelihood function, so that it would result in a tractable posterior of the same family. The widespread availability of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, however, has made this less of a concern. There are many ways to construct a prior

Prior probability - Wikipedia Jump to content From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Distribution of an uncertain quantity Part of a series on Bayesian statistics Posterior = Likelihood × Prior ÷ Evidence Background Bayesian inference Bayesian probability Bayes' theorem Bernstein–von Mises theorem Coherence Cox's theorem Cromwell's rule Likelihood principle Principle of indifference Principle of maximum entropy Model building Conjugate prior Linear regression Empirical Bayes Hierarchical model Posterior approximation Markov chain Monte Carlo Laplace's approximation Integrated nested Laplace app

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