“At heart, Bayes’ theorem is just a simple rule for updating your degree of belief in a hypothesis when you receive new evidence: if the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis, the probability of the hypothesis goes up; if not, it goes down. For example, if you test positive for AIDS, your probability of having it goes up. Things get more interesting when you have many pieces of evidence, such as the results of multiple tests. To combine them all without suffering a combinatorial explosion, we need to make simplifying assumptions. Things get even more interesting when we consider many hypotheses at once, such as all the different possible diagnoses for a patient. Computing the probability of each disease from the patient’s symptoms in a reasonable amount of time can take a lot of smarts. Once we know how to do all these things, we’ll be ready to learn the Bayesian way. For Bayesians, learning is “just” another application of Bayes’ theorem, with whole models as the hypotheses and the data as the evidence: as you see more data, some models become more likely and some less, until ideally one model stands out as the clear winner.”