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Inspired by an article on Ockham’s razor by Johnjoe McFadden, a previous post showed how a simple set of polyhedral dice can clarify the basic idea underlying Bayes factors. In the photo below, you see a family of four polyhedral dice: the D3, the D6 (this is the common six-sided die), the D12, and the D60.   The Setup You may assume…

Here we present a Bayesian analysis of data from a recent labor law case [cc; see also Hummel, 2024]. In the case, several trade unions argued that the Dutch Supreme Court had issued particular judgments (i.e., the “Enerco” judgment from 2014 and the “Amsta” judgment from 2015) that effectively imply legal restrictions on collective actions. The trade unions argue that…

The Dutch government is about to unleash upon academia a series of draconian budget cuts coupled with a series of other measures that will stunt the growth of the Dutch knowledge-based economy to the maximum extent possible. What is Dutch academia to do? A large protest is planned on November 14th, but no one will listen. The current government was…

The conference “Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences II”  will take place October 16-18 (next week!) at the University of Amsterdam. Leading researchers will discuss Bayesian advances in network modeling, demography, model selection, and language change. The complete programme is here. You can register until just before the conference starts. Currently we still have enough room to accommodate a few…

In a previous blog post, we proposed the following test of your Bayesian intuition: Three friends –Alex, Bart, and Cedric– each assign their own prior distribution to a binomial chance parameter θ. Let’s say that θ is the chance that Harriet bakes a vegan pancake rather than a bacon pancake. Alex assigns θ a beta(300,3) prior distribution, indicating a strong…

Three friends –Alex, Bart, and Cedric– each assign their own prior distribution to a binomial chance parameter θ. Let’s say that θ is the chance that Harriet bakes a vegan pancake rather than a bacon pancake. Alex assigns θ a beta(300,3) prior distribution, indicating a strong belief in high values of θ (i.e., Alex predicts that almost all of Harriet’s…

Bayes’ rule dictates how new data update the credibility of competing accounts of the world . An immediate consequence of the definition of conditional probability, Bayes’ rule is usually presented as follows: The way I mentally check this equation is to take the denominator of the expression on the right-hand side, , and multiply it with the left side of…