Interim summary: The influence of priors

“Priors affect the posterior so much! Isn’t that an unscientific way to do data analysis?”

• If you were gonna actively mess with your analysis, using priors would be an embarrassingly transparent way to do it.
• All analyses make assumptions, and all analyses are subjective. Bayesian approaches let you formalise your assumptions and put them up for debate.
• Also: as the amount of data increases, the model’s reliance on the priors decreases.

Any other questions?