Hey, Bob ... here's an article I thought you might find interesting ... chaotically speaking.
Essentially, what this boils down to is ... a study of the past can help predict the future. What a concept !! Kinda' reminds me of that phrase that was repeated occasionally around here by somebody who shall remain nameless ... "same company, same market, same management"
Thomas Bayes, one of the leading mathematical lights in computing today, differs from most of his colleagues: He has argued that the existence of God can be derived from equations. His most important paper was published by someone else. And he's been dead for 241 years.
Bayes for dummies
Bayesian theory can roughly be boiled down to one principle: To see the future, one must look at the past. Bayes theorized that the probability of future events could be calculated by determining their earlier frequency. Will a flipped coin land heads up? Experimental data assigns it a value of 0.5.
"Bayes said that essentially everything is uncertain, and you have different distributions on probability," said Ron Howard, a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford.
Suppose, for example, that instead of flipping a coin, a researcher tossed a plastic pushpin and wanted to know what the chances were that it would land flat on its back with the pin pointing up, or, if it landed on its side, what direction it would be pointing. Shape, imperfections in the molding process, weight distribution and other factors, along with the greater variety of outcomes, would affect the results.
The appeal of the Bayesian technique is its deceptive simplicity. The predictions are based completely on data culled from reality--the more data obtained, the better it works. Another advantage is that Bayesian models are self-correcting, meaning that when data changes, so do the results.
zdnet.com.com
OK, so it looks like all we need is some change, right? |
