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Introduction to the concept of likelihood and its applications (2018)

Introduction to the concept of likelihood and its applications (2018)

3 comments

·October 23, 2025
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pkoird

Perhaps it was due to English not being my primary language, but it took me an embarrassing amount of time to learn that probability and likelihood are different concepts. Concretely, we talk about probability of observing a data given an underlying assumption (model) is true while we talk about the likelihood of the model being true given we observe some data.

qwertytyyuu

Nah, that’s not a non native English thing, i think non maths background native people would make the same mistake

voidhorse

Yeah, it was a poor choice of nomenclature, since, in common, nontechnical parlance, "probable" and "likely" are very close semantically. Though I'm not sure which came first, the choice of "likelihood" for the mathematical concept or the casual use of "likely" as more or less synonymous with probable.