BETA: A FORTRAN IV program for calculating the mean, standard deviation, and the mode of the prior and posterior beta distributions

Abstract

After calculating the values of the prior distribution of the proportion of red chips in the urn, one can take a random sample of chips, with replacement, from the urn. Each observation of a red chip can be recorded as a "success" (s) and each observation of a blue chip as a "failure" (t). If N observations are taken, then N = s + 7, where sand 7, respectively, stand for the number of successes and the number of failures. Now, the new posterior distribution of opinion will also be a beta with parameters p" and q", where