Likelihood ratio

Written by Nate Soares, et al. last updated
Teaches: Likelihood

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  • Summary

    Given a piece of evidence and two hypothsese and the likelihood ratio between them is the ratio of the likelihood each hypothesis assigns to For example, let = "Mr. Boddy was knifed", and say that Professor Plum is 25% likely to use a knife while Mrs. White is only 5% likely to use a knife. Then the likelihood ratio of between the hypotheses "Plum did it" and "Mrs. White did it" is 25/5 = 5/1. See also Relative likelihood.

  • Given a piece of evidence  and two hypotheses  and  the likelihood ratio between them is the ratio of the likelihood each hypothesis assigns to 

    For example, imagine the evidence is  = "Mr. Boddy was knifed", and the hypotheses are  = "Professor Plum did it" and  = "Mrs. White did it." Let's say that, if Professor Plum were the killer, we're 25% sure he would have used a knife. Let's also say that, if Mrs. White were the killer, there's only a 5% chance she would have used a knife. Then the likelihood ratio of  between  and  is 25/5 = 5, which says that  assigns five times as much likelihood to  as does  which means that the evidence supports the "Plum did it" hypothesis five times as much as it supports the "Mrs. White did it" hypothesis.

    A likelihood ratio of 5 denotes relative likelihoods of  Relative likelihoods can be multiplied by odds in order to update those odds, as per Bayes' rule.

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