CamDavidsonPilon / Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers

aka "Bayesian Methods for Hackers": An introduction to Bayesian methods + probabilistic programming with a computation/understanding-first, mathematics-second point of view. All in pure Python ;)
http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/
MIT License
26.71k stars 7.87k forks source link

Incorrect or ambiguous sentence in Ch. 1 #500

Open cmencar opened 4 years ago

cmencar commented 4 years ago

The sentence

An individual who assigns a belief of 0 to an event has no confidence that the event will occur;

in Ch1_Introduction_PyMC2.ipynb does not seem to be correct or it is ambiguous. When belief is interpreted as probability, then an individual who assigns a belief of 0 to an event has full confidence that the event will not occur. If an individual assigns a belief of 0 to an event when (s)he has no confidence that the event will occur (that is, the individual is completely uncertain whether the event will occur or not) then, belief is interpreted as "necessity", not as probability. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possibility_theory#Necessity