Allen Downey
Allen Downey is a Staff Scientist at DrivenData and Professor Emeritus at Olin College.
He is the author of several textbooks -- including Think Python, Think Bayes, and Elements of Data Science -- and "Probably Overthinking It", a blog about data science and Bayesian statistics. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley and Bachelor's and Master's degrees from MIT.
Sessions
This tutorial is a hands-on introduction to Bayesian Decision Analysis (BDA), which is a framework for using probability to guide decision-making under uncertainty. I start with Bayes's Theorem, which is the foundation of Bayesian statistics, and work toward the Bayesian bandit strategy, which is used for A/B testing, medical tests, and related applications. For each step, I provide a Jupyter notebook where you can run Python code and work on exercises. In addition to the bandit strategy, I summarize two other applications of BDA, optimal bidding and deriving a decision rule. Finally, I suggest resources you can use to learn more.