Exercise 1: A Second Round of Fraud-Detection Evidence — Possible Solution ==================================================================== GIVEN ------------------------------ Round 1 posterior (from Probability & Statistics Fundamentals Ch.4): P(fraud | flagged) ~= 0.0454 This becomes the round-2 prior. New evidence: P(location | fraud) = 0.70 P(location | not fraud) = 0.10 STEP 1: THE TOTAL PROBABILITY OF THE NEW EVIDENCE ------------------------------ Using this chapter's own sequential-updating method, with prior = 0.0454: P(location) = P(location|fraud) x prior + P(location|not fraud) x (1-prior) = (0.70)(0.0454) + (0.10)(0.9546) = 0.03178 + 0.09546 = 0.12724 STEP 2: APPLYING BAYES' THEOREM AGAIN ------------------------------ P(fraud | flagged AND location) = [P(location|fraud) x prior] / P(location) = 0.03178 / 0.12724 ~= 0.2497 (about 25%) STEP 3: THE FULL UPDATE SEQUENCE ------------------------------ Prior (0.1%) -> after "flagged" (~4.5%) -> after "unusual location" (~25%) Two corroborating signals together raised the belief this transaction is fraudulent from a 0.1% baseline all the way to roughly 1 in 4 - a dramatic update, even though the transaction is still more likely NOT fraudulent than fraudulent at this point. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ The round-1 posterior is correctly used as the round-2 prior per this chapter's own sequential-updating method, the law of total probability and Bayes' Theorem are applied a second time exactly as shown in the chapter's own spam-filter example, and the full three-step belief progression is stated explicitly to show the cumulative effect of both pieces of evidence together.