Bayes' Theorem And Robot Arms Open Data Science Conferences

If you enjoyed Jesse's presentation at ODSC's last Boston Big Data Conference come to ODSC East this May to hear out his colleagues. Rather than start with the statement of Bayes' Theorem, I want to use an old math teacher trick (which I realize many students hate) of trying to derive it from scratch, without stating what we're trying to derive. Rather, we'll start by modifying a problem that I described in an earlier post on probability distributions1. Bayes' gives you a way of determining the probability that a given event will occur, or that a given condition is true, given your knowledge of another related event or condition. All the examples that I've read or heard about seemed somewhat contrived and unrelated to the sorts of data analysis I was interested in.