About the Bayesian Scientific Working Group

Mission Statement

The Bayesian Scientific Working Group (BSWG) was formed in 2011 with the vision to ensure that Bayesian methods are well-understood and broadly utilized for design and analysis throughout the medical product development process and to improve industrial, regulatory and economic decision making. The group is comprised of individuals from academia, industry and regulatory authorities. As Bayesian applications in medical product development are wide ranging, several sub-teams were formed to focus on various Bayesian topics such as safety, non-inferiority, prior specification, comparative effectiveness, joint modeling, program wide decision making, tools and education. As of 2025, we are officially organized within the Biopharmaceutical Section of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

What is Bayesian Statistics?

Bayesian statistics, named for the Scottish statistician and minister Thomas Bayes (1701-1761), is a theory in the field of statistics in which the evidence about the true state of the world is expressed in terms of ‘degrees of belief’ called Bayesian probabilities. Such an interpretation is only one of a number of interpretations of probability and there are other statistical techniques that are not based on ‘degrees of belief’. One of the key ideas of Bayesian statistics is that “probability is orderly opinion, and that inference from data is nothing other than the revision of such opinion in the light of relevant new information.”