Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370

Uncertainty is all pervasive-whether it relates to everyday personal choices and actions, or as background to business and policy decisions, or economic and climate predictions. In recent times, few things have attracted as much attention as the uncertainty surrounding the final whereabouts of MH370.
How to deal scientifically with uncertainty? Put simply, on the one hand there are events or outcomes of interest that we don’t know; on the other hand, pieces of information that we judge relevant in some sense that we do know. We need to assess what we believe about the unknowns, given the knowns.
Formalising our measure of uncertainty in terms of probabilities, the scientific approach is encapsulated in the so-called Bayesian statistical paradigm, in which beliefs about the unknowns are quantified by a probability measure conditional on what we know.
[Cham: 2016]

Compartir: