Facilitated Prior Elicitation with the Wolfram CDF

One of the key advantages of the Bayesian paradigm is the ability to incorporate past experiences and expert opinion into statistical analyses. However, the principled, precise distillation of expert opinion into a probability distribution, a task known as prior elicitation, is challenging and involves considerations from psychology, computational science, software engineering, and other related fields. Moreover, for elicitation to be practical, applied statisticians need good computer tools to enable its use–to perform complex calculations and provide feedback. Such computer programs are called facilitators. Using the prior elicitation of a population proportion as a canonical example, in this article we contend that Wolfram Research Inc.’s Mathematica/CDF Player/CDF suite of technologies provides a new state-of-the-art platform for the development and dissemination of free facilitators. To illustrate its capabilities, we present a free facilitator that enables, in a real-time interactive environment, the computations and diagnostics required of an elicitation method known as the mode/percentile (MP) method.