👉 Likelihoods, or "math likes," are a fundamental concept in probability theory that describe the relative likelihood of different outcomes in a probabilistic experiment. They are often represented as numbers between 0 and 1, where 0 indicates impossibility and 1 signifies certainty. A likelihood of 0.5, for instance, means the event is equally likely to occur or not at all. Higher likelihoods indicate more probable events, while lower ones suggest less probable outcomes. Likelihoods are crucial for making predictions, assessing risks, and understanding the behavior of random processes in fields ranging from statistics and machine learning to finance and engineering. They form the basis for more advanced probabilistic models and are used extensively in Bayesian inference, where they update prior beliefs with new evidence to form posterior probabilities.
