3 ms·

> What am I missing? Beta

• hammock 1y ago
  What are the common understandable use cases for beta distribution, in everyday life?
  • jwarden 1y ago
    I don’t use probability distributions in everyday life ;) But it is the right distribution to represent uncertainty about the probability of binary events (eg a website user clicking some button). For example, if I have absolutely no idea the probability then I use the uniform distribution, Beta(1,1), which is the maximum entropy distribution. Then if I observe one user and they happen to click, I have Beta(2,1), and at a glance I known the mean of that (2/3) which is a useful point estimate.
  • klysm 1y ago
    Proportions of things frequently follow beta distributions. I think of it as the normal distribution of the domain 0 to 1.