concept prior in category machine learning

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Grokking Machine Learning MEAP V09. Login to get full access to this book.

Figure 6.4. The prior, the event, and the posterior. The prior is the ‘raw’ probability, namely, the probability we calculate when we know very little. The event is the information that we obtain which will help us refine our calculation of the probability. The posterior is the ‘cooked’ probability, or the much more accurate probability that we calculate when we have more information.