AP Statistics Curriculum 2007 Bayesian Other

From Socr

Bayesian Inference for the Binomial Distribution

The parameters of interest in this section is the probability P of success in a number of trials which can result in either success or failure with the trials being independent of one another and having the same probability of success. Suppose that there are n trials such that you have an observation of x successes from a binomial distribution of index n and parameter P

x ~ B(n,P)

subsequently, we can show that p(x|P) = P^x (1 − P)^{n − x} , (x = 0, 1, …, n)

p(x|P) is proportional to P^x(1 − P)^{n − x}

If the prior density has the form: p(P) proportional to P^{α − 1}(P − 1)^{β − 1} , (P between 0 and 1)

then it follows the beta distribution P ~ β(α,β)

From this we can appropriate the posterior which evidently has the form

p(P|x) is proportional to P^{α + x − 1}(1 − P)^{β + n − x − 1}

The posterior distribution of the Binomial is

(P|x) ~ β(α + x, β + n – x)

Bayesian Inference for the Poisson Distribution

A discrete random variable x is said to have a Poisson distribution of mean λ if it has the density

P(x|λ) = (λ^x < / x!)e ^{− λ}

Supose that you have n observations x=(x1, x2, …, xn) from such a distribution so that the likelihood is

L(λ|x) = λ^Te^{( − nλ)}, where T =

In Bayesian inference, the conjugate prior for the parameter λ of the Poisson distribution is the Gamma distribution.

Gamma(α , β )

The Poisson parameter λ is distributed accordingly to the parameterized Gamma density g in terms of a shape and inverse scale parameter α and β respectively

g(λ|α , β) = λ^{α − 1}e ^{− βλ} For λ > 0

Then, given the same sample of n measured values k_i from our likelihood and a prior of Gamma(α, β), the posterior distribution becomes

Gamma ( , β + n)

The posterior mean E[λ] approaches the maximum likelihood estimate in the limit as α and β approach 0.