Bayes Theorem hypothetical situation

131 Views Asked by At

Let's say I have a friend named Dave. There was a murder committed next door. Dave is most likely the killer.

P(dave committed murder)=0.99

However, the probability that Dave would leave a blond hair at the scene is 0.1

Almost nobody is as careful as Dave and the overall probability that a blond hair would've been left at the crime scene is 0.99.

I found a hair at the scene. What's the probability Dave committed the murder?

The answer would be (.99*.1)/.99 which equals 0.1.

So in this case, P(B|A)=P(A|B). However I don't see how this is completely true. Dave almost definitely committed the murder. I get that it's a slim chance that he left the blond hair at the scene but does it really reduce the probability he did it from .99 to .1?

Thank you in advance.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

4
On BEST ANSWER

Your intuition is correct. That does not sound, and it isn't, right.

Let $x$ be the conditional probability that a hair is left at the scene given that somebody else did it. By the law of total probability, the probability that a hair is left at the scene is $$ 0.99 = 0.99 \times 0.1 + 0.01 \times x $$

So $x=89.1>1$, which cannot be a probability. The problem statement implicitly contains a probability larger than one, so the problem is wrong (but not Bayes). Since $x\le1$, the maximum probability that a hair is left at the scene is $$0.99 \times 0.1 + 0.01 \times 1=0.109$$ which is far less than $0.99$.

More specifically, the problem with the construction is that it does not satisfy the additivity axiom. The sum of probability that dave did it and a hair was found and probability that someone else did it and a hair was found should be equal to probability that a hair was found, since the first two events are mutually exclusive.