Conclusion

Following completion of this free OpenLearn course, Bayesian statistics, as well as being able to ‘understand the key ideas of Bayesian statistics’ you should also find that your skills and confidence in tackling questions on probability are improving.

You should now be able to:

• use relative frequencies to estimate probabilities
• calculate conditional probabilities
• calculate posterior probabilities using Bayes’ theorem
• calculate simple likelihood functions
• describe the role of the posterior distribution, the likelihood function and the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference about a parameter Ɵ.

This free OpenLearn course is an extract from the Open University course M249 Practical modern statistics [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

If you feel you are ready to move on in your study of statistics but don’t have time to study a full Open University course at this time, you might like to study the free OpenLearn course Medical statistics, a second adapted extract from the Open University course M249 Practical modern statistics. Alternatively, you might like to try the free OpenLearn course Modelling and estimation, an adapted extract from the Open University course M248 Analysing data.

If you are interested in pure mathematics, you might like to try the free OpenLearn courses Introduction to group theory, Introduction to linear equations and matrices and Introduction to analysis.

If you are interested in applied mathematics, you might like to try the free OpenLearn courses Second-order differential equations and Dynamics.