Applied Ecosystem Services, LLC

The Environmental Issues Doctor

The frequentist and likelihood frameworks for analyzing environmental data assume that there is a “true” state of the world represented by the values described by a single hypothesis and its probability distribution. The Bayesian framework assumes that observations are the “truth” while the hypotheses explaining the observations have probability distributions. The Bayesian approach solves many conceptual problems of applying the frequentist approach to environmental data because Bayesian results depend on observations (or measurements) rather than on a range of hypothetical outcomes. Also the Bayesian approach allows comparison of the probabilities of different hypotheses explaining the observations.

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Providing essential environmental services since 1993.