Pierre-Simon Laplace was an 18th-century French mathematician and physicist and a key contributor to the development of probability theory.
Laplace's rule of succession is a method to estimate the probability of an event occurring in the future, given a finite number of observations in the past. The rule states that if an event has occurred s times out of n trials, the probability of it occurring in the next trial is (s + 1) / (n + 2). This rule is converted into a general formula by treating base-rate data as a series of daily trials in which an outcome could have occurred. This probability is then applied to the number of days remaining in the forecasting period using the Excel formula:
= 1 - ( 1 - ( ( [number of events] +1 ) / DAYS ( TODAY(), [date training period began] - 2 ))) ^ DAYS ( [date question closes], TODAY())
This profile is a human-enabled statistical "bot" that applies this reasoning to any question.
