I recently gave a talk in Bielefeld, Germany with the title “Bayesian statistical concepts: A gentle introduction.” I had a few people ask for the slides so I figured I would post them here. If you are a regular reader of this blog, it should all look pretty familiar. It was a mesh of a couple of my Understanding Bayes posts, combining “A look at the Likelihood” and the most recent one, “Evidence vs. Conclusions.” The main goal was to give the audience an appreciation for the comparative nature of Bayesian statistical evidence, as well as demonstrate how evidence in the sample has to be interpreted in the context of the specific problem. I didn’t go into Bayes factors or posterior estimation because I promised that it would be a simple and easy talk about the basic concepts.

I’m very grateful to JP de Ruiter for inviting me out to Bielefeld to give this talk, in part because it was my first talk ever! I think it went well enough, but there are a lot of things I can improve on; both in terms of slide content and verbal presentation. JP is very generous with his compliments, and he also gave me a lot of good pointers to incorporate for the next time I talk Bayes.

The main narrative of my talk was that we were to draw candies from one of two possible bags and try to figure out which bag we were drawing from. After each of the slides where I proposed the game I had a member of the audience actually come up and play it with me. The candies, bags, and cards were real but the bets were hypothetical. It was a lot of fun. 🙂

Here is a picture JP took during the talk.

Here are the slides. (You can download a pdf copy from here.)