Dealing with this prior knowledge is what is called “Bayesian statistics.” Early in this book we mentioned that the inventor of this approach, Thomas Bayes, was an eighteenth-century British mathematician and Presbyterian minister whose most famous contribution to statistics would not be published until after he died. Bayesian statistics deals with the issue of how we update prior knowledge with new information. With Bayesian analysis, we start with how much we know now and then consider how that knowledge is changed by new information.
