Talk:Likelihood

Disambiguation
This article previously redirected to likelihood function, but I could sense a significant difference, such as its talk page entry "Which came first? the common use as in "in all likelihood this will not occur" or the mathematical function?". I have the idea that likelihood can be expressed in terms of either probability and odds, or am I wrong? Anyhow, I think at least disambiguation page is warranted. Mikael Häggström (talk) 05:00, 25 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. I don't think it should even be labelled as a dab page, as it could be massively expanded. The book I cited, (James franklin, the science of conjecture) seems to be an excellent source for probabilistic reasoning before the invention of math -- goes back to insurance contracts for shipping in ancient egypt, greece, and various legal cases 500BC to 1500 AD that deal with the "likelihood" that something may or may not happen. I've only read the first chapter so far, but its fascinating... linas (talk) 21:38, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

"Weaker??"
The article here says:

"Likelihood is a function of how likely an event is, which is weaker than probability (or odds in favor)."

I know likelihoods and probabilities fairly well, but I have no idea what this is saying. As pointed out clearly in Likelihood function, the true difference is as follows:

"likelihood function (often simply the likelihood) is a function of the parameters of a statistical model... that is $$\mathcal{L}(\theta |x) = P(x | \theta)$$."

Saying they are weaker makes it sound like they are somehow capturing the same idea, but that likelihood has weaker confidence or some such.

Merger with Likelihood Function
This page was originally redirected to likelihood function. Then it became a stub because of the colloquial usage of the term. However, the discussion of likelihood as different from the function was only a single sentence and does not deserve its own page. The remainder of the page was basically a redirect to likelihood function anyway. I've merged the content and redirected this page to the appropriate section of the other page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Prax54 (talk • contribs) 19:00, 26 January 2015 (UTC)