Watching from the Other Side

I’m reading a book about the fundamental theories of bioinformatics: Biological sequence analysis – Probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids. Thanks to the English book! I chewed and digested it very carefully. Even though I only finished less than four pages in a day, I have acquired some very important things from it.

Several years have passed since the first time I met the statistics. One of the most important theorems, Bayes’ theorem, was taught to me long time ago. But till today, could I understand some practical usages of it. When I did exercises of statistics in the past, I just mechanically calculated the probabilities of result events from given conditions. Many times in science research, however, we need to estimate probability of a hypothesis from the observed result. And Bayes’ theorem supports a way to achieve this.

In my option, it just likes exchanging the positions of reason and result in the calculating process. But right for the exchanging, more problems can be resolved by existed methods. I remember something in my childhood. I had a very beautiful kaleidoscope, and I watched it in all those days. When I was told to try to watch it from the other side, I found that there was a more amazing view.