Conditional Probability (Bayes Theorem) Visualized
It’s powerful to understand how conditional probability can be visualized using decision trees. I wanted to create an alternative to most explanations which often start with many abstractions. I was drawn to the idea of looking at the back pages of a choose-your-own-adventure book, and deciding how you could have arrived there. Here I present a visual method using a story involving coins… allowing you to decide how to formalize. Once we grow tired of growing trees, we may ask the key questions: how can we speed up this process?:
This is followed by a game I designed (built by Peter Collingridge) which introduces how branches can be weighted instead of counted.
Thanks to Kalid Azad for reviewing this lesson.
Brit Cruise 
January 24, 2013 at 10:42 am
Very clear tree explanation for conditional probability and enjoyable to watch!
January 24, 2013 at 5:55 pm
Well done! Very clean and meticulously crafted (background, light etc)
I wonder how much work went into a 5 minute video?
Two suggestions:
1) You might find prezi.com useful for this kind of presentations.
2) Colorized coins would make visuals even stronger (as long as obverse and reverse have different colors, or just one side is colorizes).
Thank you for the video!
January 24, 2013 at 6:15 pm
Thanks for the feedback! Great idea. My initial plan was to color the coins…that would have been the icing on the cake. However I was running out of time 🙂
I wish I could make changes like that inside YouTubes editor
To your question, this video took 2 full days of scripting (re-working examples over and over) and 1 full day of filming and editing. It was a fun one!