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9/11 Remembered
Reviving Bayes
Ever since its publication over 200 years ago, Bayes’ theory of conditional probability has been a point of bitter contention and controversy among many statisticians. At its heart, the underlying mathematics is surprisingly simple and can be very useful when solving straightforward probability problems. When applied to real world problems, however, where data is often intertwined with series of prior probabilities based on experience and belief, the calculation can become dauntingly complex. But with the recent advancement in computer technology, common processors have become powerful enough to handle the computational demand of Bayesian statistics, and it is fast finding its way into the day to day operations of many of today’s biggest corporations. "We now have the tools. We are able to use Bayesian Methods," commented Dr. Andy P. Grieve, a senior statistical consultant at Pfizer, in the April 14th issue of the New York Times.

According to the Times article, industry leaders such as Pfizer, Microsoft, and NCR Corporation are hard at work applying Bayesian methods to solve real world problems.

    Pfizer is melding existing knowledge about broad drug categories with results from early animal tests to design optimal drug trials for human beings. Microsoft has created a Bayesian computer program that can analyze incoming e-mail and phone calls to determine which are urgent and which can be temporarily ignored. NCR Corporation, which makes ATMs and bar-code scanners, and a consortium of big banks run a research center in London that is trying to use Bayesian methods to figure out which loans or investments different types of people are most likely to want.

    And a small British company called Autonomy, whose founder wrote his doctoral thesis on Bayesian methods, sells software that helps computers intelligently sort through the vast amounts of information that large organizations now produce on any given day. Autonomy's clients include the United States Departments of Defense and Energy, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain.

The article further reported:
    Few companies are making a bigger push than Microsoft, which is trying to design software that would become a virtual secretary. The software, now being tested, combines facts about who has sent an e-mail message and the words it contains with information about a user's habits. The program then decides whether the user can wait a few minutes, or even hours, to see the message.
"We want to understand how to work with people in the way an insightful colleague would," commented Dr. Eric Horvitz, who oversees a team of 20 researchers at Microsoft. "We're still a ways off from that, but that's the goal." "All this effort springs from an essay that is older not only than Microsoft or the computer itself, but the United States or the harnessing of electricity as well," reported the Times. "As Dr. Lynch (founder and C.E.O. of Autonomy) said, 'It's taken 250 years for the rest of us to realize just how intelligent Thomas Bayes was.’"

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