Model-Based Machine Learning (Early Access): Chapter 1. A Murder Mystery

This is an example of a probability distribution because it specifies the probability for each possible state of the random variable murderer. In this case the distribution is over a random variable which has two possible states. We will sometimes use the notation to denote the distribution over the random variable murderer. This can be viewed as a shorthand notation for the combination of and . At this point it is useful to introduce a pictorial representation of a probability distribution that will help to explain some of the later calculations.