Topic summary
Bayesian analysis
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Bayesian inference.
Computer applications
Bayesian inference has applications in artificial intelligence and expert systems. Bayesian inference techniques have been a fundamental part of computerized pattern recognition techniques since the late 1950s. There is also an ever-growing connection between Bayesian methods and simulation-based Monte Carlo techniques since complex models cannot be processed in closed form by a Bayesian analysis, while a graphical model structure may allow for efficient simulation algorithms like the Gibbs sampling and other Metropolis–Hastings algorithm schemes. Recently Bayesian inference has gained popularity among the phylogenetics community for these reasons; a number of applications allow many demographic and evolutionary parameters to be estimated simultaneously.