I often hear people say that the results from Bayesian methods are the same as the results from frequentist methods, at least under certain conditions. And sometimes it even comes from people who understand Bayesian methods. Today I saw this tweet from Julia Rohrer: "Running a Bayesian multi-membership multi-level probit model with a custom function to generate average marginal effects only to find that the estimate is precisely the same as the one generated by linear regression with dummy-coded group membership." Which elicited what I interpret as good-natured teasing, like this tweet from Daniël Lakens: "I always love it when people realize that the main difference between a frequentist and Bayesian analysis is that for the latter approach you first need to wait 24 hours for the results." Ok, that's funny, but there is a serious point here I want to respond to because both of these comments are based on the premise that we can compare the results from Bayesian and frequentist methods.

In this article, I will provide a basic introduction to Bayesian learning and explore topics such as frequentist statistics, the drawbacks of the frequentist method, Bayes's theorem (introduced with an example), and the differences between the frequentist and Bayesian methods using the coin flip experiment as the example. To begin, let's try to answer this question: what is the frequentist method? When we flip a coin, there are two possible outcomes -- heads or tails. Of course, there is a third rare possibility where the coin balances on its edge without falling onto either side, which we assume is not a possible outcome of the coin flip for our discussion. We conduct a series of coin flips and record our observations i.e. the number of the heads (or tails) observed for a certain number of coin flips. In this experiment, we are trying to determine the fairness of the coin, using the number of heads (or tails) that we observe.

It's impossible to collect all the relevant data to answer any particular question, so there is necessarily uncertainty in our analysis. As such, we need to quantify the uncertainty and from that judge our results. Traditional statistical methods (also called frequentist methods) such as hypothesis testing and confidence intervals often don't address this appropriately. For example, we typically want to know the probability that a parameter falls in some range, but this type of analysis is unavailable from a frequentist perspective. Developing a statistical model with frequentist methods is often out of reach for typical data analysts so they are left asking "What test do I apply to this data?"

Many people have found the table above to be useful for understanding two conceptual distinctions in the practice of data analysis. The article that discusses the table, and many other issues, is now in press. The in-press version can be found at OSF and at SSRN. Abstract: In the practice of data analysis, there is a conceptual distinction between hypothesis testing, on the one hand, and estimation with quantified uncertainty, on the other hand. Among frequentists in psychology a shift of emphasis from hypothesis testing to estimation has been dubbed "the New Statistics" (Cumming, 2014).

We propose a new Bayesian method for spatial cluster detection, the "Bayesian spatial scan statistic," and compare this method to the standard (frequentist) scan statistic approach. We demonstrate that the Bayesian statistic has several advantages over the frequentist approach, including increased power to detect clusters and (since randomization testing is unnecessary) much faster runtime. We evaluate the Bayesian and frequentist methods on the task of prospective disease surveillance: detecting spatial clusters of disease cases resulting from emerging disease outbreaks. We demonstrate that our Bayesian methods are successful in rapidly detecting outbreaks while keeping number of false positives low.

We propose a new Bayesian method for spatial cluster detection, the "Bayesian spatial scan statistic," and compare this method to the standard (frequentist) scan statistic approach. We demonstrate that the Bayesian statistic has several advantages over the frequentist approach, including increased power to detect clusters and (since randomization testing is unnecessary) much faster runtime. We evaluate the Bayesian and frequentist methods on the task of prospective disease surveillance: detecting spatial clusters of disease cases resulting from emerging disease outbreaks. We demonstrate that our Bayesian methods are successful in rapidly detecting outbreaks while keeping number of false positives low.

We propose a new Bayesian method for spatial cluster detection, the "Bayesian spatial scan statistic," and compare this method to the standard (frequentist) scan statistic approach. We demonstrate that the Bayesian statistic has several advantages over the frequentist approach, including increased power to detect clusters and (since randomization testing is unnecessary) much faster runtime. We evaluate the Bayesian and frequentist methodson the task of prospective disease surveillance: detecting spatial clusters of disease cases resulting from emerging disease outbreaks. Wedemonstrate that our Bayesian methods are successful in rapidly detecting outbreaks while keeping number of false positives low.