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RogerL • yesterday at 4:20 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

MC is used because there is no analytic solution. Only some likelihood functions have a conjugate prior. You have to rework the analytic solution for every model change (where most changes would result it in being non-analytic anyway), and they don't work well for high dimensional problems. Restricting the tool to analytic would mostly result in a toy app that just does Gaussians.