on estimates represent the (center, (lower, upper)) with center the mean of the conditional pdf of the value given the data and (lower, upper) is a confidence interval centered on the median, containing the estimate to a probability ``alpha``. Converts data to 1-D and assumes all data has the same mean and variance. Uses Jeffrey's prior for variance and std. Equivalent to ``tuple((x.mean(), x.interval(alpha)) for x in mvsdist(dat))`` References ---------- T.E. Oliphant, "A Bayesian perspective on estimating mean, variance, and standard-deviation from data", https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/278, 2006. Examples -------- First a basic example to demonstrate the outputs: >>> from scipy import stats >>> data = [6, 9, 12, 7, 8, 8, 13] >>> mean, var, std = stats.bayes_mvs(data) >>> mean Mean(statistic=9.0, minmax=(7.103650222612533, 10.896349777387467)) >>> var Variance(statistic=10.0, minmax=(3.176724206, 24.45910382)) >>> std Std_dev(statistic=2.9724954732045084, minmax=(1.7823367265645143, 4.945614605014631)) Now we generate some normally distributed random data, and get estimates of mean and standard deviation with 95% confidence intervals for those estimates: >>> n_samples = 100000 >>> data = stats.norm.rvs(size=n_samples) >>> res_mean, res_var, res_std = stats.bayes_mvs(data, alpha=0.95) >>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt >>> fig = plt.figure() >>> ax = fig.add_subplot(111) >>> ax.hist(data, bins=100, density=True, label='Histogram of data') >>> ax.vlines(res_mean.statistic, 0, 0.5, colors='r', label='Estimated mean') >>> ax.axvspan(res_mean.minmax[0],res_mean.minmax[1], facecolor='r', ... alpha=0.2, label=r'Estimated mean (95% limits)') >>> ax.vlines(res_std.statistic, 0, 0.5, colors='g', label='Estimated scale') >>> ax.axvspan(res_std.minmax[0],res_std.minmax[1], facecolor='g', alpha=0.2, ... label=r'Estimated scale (95% limits)') >>> ax.legend(fontsize=10) >>> ax.set_xlim([-4, 4]) >>> ax.set_ylim([0, 0.5]) >>> plt.show() r!