Probability and statistics are the fundamental mathematical tools that allow us to model, reason and proceed with inference in uncertain environments. Each probabilistic situation that we wish to analyse can be viewed in the context of any non-deterministic process (experiment) that has a number of distinct possible outcomes. There are two possible approaches:
- Frequentist approach (a hypothesis is tested without being assigned a probability)
- Bayesian approach (a probability is assigned to a hypothesis)
Before constructing a probabilistic model, one must identify the sample space for the corresponding experiment and assign probabilities to events in the sample space. The model is usually a certain kind of probabilistic network (i.e. network containing random variables).