Bayesian Models Honors 207, Intro to Cognitive Science David Allbritton An introduction to Bayes' Theorem and Bayesian models of human cognition

Bayes Theorem: An Introduction ● What is Bayes' Theorem? ● What does it mean? ● An application: Calculating a probability ● What are distributions? ● Bayes' Theorem using distributions ● An application to cognitive modelling: perception

What is Bayes' Theorem? ● A theorem of probability theory ● Concerns “conditional probabilities”  Example 1: Probability class is cancelled if it snows ● P (A | B) ● “Probability of A given B,” where A = “class is cancelled” and B = “it snows.”  Example 2: Probability that it snowed, if class was cancelled ● P (B | A) ● Bayes' Theorem tells how these two conditional probabilities are related

What is Bayes Theorem? (cont.) P (B | A) * P (A) P (A | B) = P (B) likelihood * prior posterior probability = normalizing constant

What does it mean? ● The “prior” is the probability of A as estimated before you knew anything about B; the prior probability of A. ● The “likelihood” is the new information you have that will change your estimate of the probability of A; it is the likelihood of B if A were true. ● The “normalizing constant” just turns the resulting quantity into a probability (a number between 0 and 1); it is not that interesting to us.

An application: Calculating a probability "A cab was involved in a hit and run accident. There are two cab companies in town, the green (85% of the cabs in the city) and the blue (15%). A witness said that the cab in the accident was blue. Tests showed that the witness is 80% reliable in identifying cabs." Question: What is the probability that the cab in the accident was blue? A = The cab is blue. B = The witness says the cab is blue. P (A) = prior probability that the cab is blue P (B) = overall probability that the witness says the cab is blue P (B | A) = likelihood the witness says the cab is blue when it really is blue P (A | B) = posterior probability the cab is blue given that the witness says it is P(A) =.15 P(B|A) =.8 P(B) = P(B|A)*P(A) + P(B|~A)*P(~A) =.8* *.85 =.29 P (A | B) = [ P(B | A) * P(A) ] / P(B) =.8 *.15 /.29 =.41

What are distributions? ● Demonstration:  ● Terms  Probability density function: area under the curve = 1  Normal distribution, Gaussian distribution  Standard deviation  Uniform distribution

Bayes Theorem using distributions ● Posterior, prior and likelihood are not single values, but functions over distributions ● P(theta | phi) = P(phi | theta) * P(theta) / P(phi) ● Posterior dist. = C * likelihood dist. * prior dist.  C is just a normalizing constant to make the posterior distribution sum to 1, and can be ignored here ● Because the posterior is a distribution, need a decision rule to use it to choose a value to output

An application to cognitive modeling: perception ● Task: guess the distal angle theta that produced the observed proximal angle phi  The viewing angle is unknown, so theta is unknown ● p (theta | phi) = posterior; result of combining our prior knowledge and perceptual information ● p (phi | theta) = likelihood; probabilities for various values of theta to produce the observed value of phi ● p (theta) = prior; probabilities of various values of theta that were known before phi was observed ● Gain function = rewards for correct guess, penalties for incorrect guesses ● Decision rule = function of posterior and gain function

More information: ● ●