Solved – If I have a table of conditional probability values can I find any joint distribution value

conditional probability

If my table is $(KV)^2$ where $K$ is the number of states and $V$ is the number of variables. Thus, I have the conditional probability for any 2 variables. Is it possible to find the joint distribution for any of the variables?

Best Answer

If the situation is as given below, the table represents your joint probability distributions $P(x,y)$:

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Conditionals are normalised rows or columns, i.e. in the table given $P(y | x=1) = P(y, x=1) / P(x=1)$.

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So, for example $P(y=1|x=1) = 0.8$.

If you have the conditional probability table to start with, you can acquire the joint probability table provided that you have the marginal probabilities (row and column sums) per each variable state.

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