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 ...

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 ...

SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was ...

What would Thomas Bayes think? In 1763, he proposed a new approach to calculate probabilities. An international team has now updated his ideas to deliver a quantum Bayes' rule. (Courtesy: Centre for ...

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 ...

Google has a small fleet of robotic cars that since autumn have driven themselves for thousands of miles on the streets of northern California without once striking a pedestrian, running a stoplight ...

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 ...

How likely you think something is to happen depends on what you already believe about the circumstances. That is the simple concept behind Bayes' rule, an approach to calculating probabilities, first ...

pt. 1. Enlightenment and the anti-Bayesian reaction -- Causes in the air -- The man who did everything -- Many doubts, few defenders -- pt. 2. Second World War era -- Bayes goes to war -- Dead and ...