Applying Bayes' Theorem to clinical trials

摘要

Over the years, many writers have implied that statistics can provide almost any result that is convenient at the time. Of course, honest practitioners use statistics in an attempt to quantify the probability that a certain hypothesis is true or false or to better understand what the data actually means. The field of statistics has been developed over more than 200 years by famous mathematicians such as Laplace, Gauss, and Pascal and more recently Markov, Fisher, and Wiener. Pastor Thomas Bayes (1702-1761) appears to have had little influence on mathematics outside of statistics where Bayes' Theorem has found wide application.