Bayesian approach to shipping reliability and safety

In a Bayesian approach, there are two main sources of information about parameters of interest such as prior beliefs or the prior distribution of the parameter and the likelihood of observing the data given our expectations about the parameter. The prior distribution may be based on previous studies, literature reviews or expert opinions and indicates how we believe the parameter would behave if we had no data upon which to base our judgments. In case where we have less data, the prior has greater influence. The maximum likelihood estimate predominates only when we have a lot of data. The posterior distribution is the result of combining the prior distribution and the likelihood. In the paper the examples of using Bayes approach to shipping operational reliability and safety is presented.