Apply Bayesian analysis to real engineering, science, and business problems

Professionals facing uncertain data need a complete workflow from problem framing to defensible decisions. Bayesian Thinking: Case Studies and AI Tools to Support Data-Driven Decisions in Engineering, Science, and Business delivers that workflow through case studies in reliability engineering, medical diagnostics, economics, and product quality. Readers master every stage: framing real-world questions as probabilistic models, eliciting domain-informed priors, selecting models via Bayes factors and WAIC, running inference in R and Stan, and applying statistical decision theory to optimize actions.

The book shows how to partner with AI for prompt engineering, model exploration, and sensitivity analysis while preserving human judgment and rigor. Clear code snippets, visual diagnostics, and posterior predictive checks build intuition fast. You will learn to optimize maintenance schedules, evaluate diagnostic tests, model system performance, and extract actionable insights from noisy data under uncertainty.

• Integrate artificial intelligence as a collaborative partner in Bayesian workflows for smarter prior elicitation, model exploration, and sensitivity analysis.
• Elicit and calibrate informative priors from domain knowledge across engineering, medicine, and business with transparency and mathematical rigor.
• Interpret posterior distributions confidently using visual diagnostics, trace plots, and posterior predictive checks during iterative model building.
• Transform ambiguous real-world problems into formal Bayesian models ready for rigorous inference and statistical decision analysis.
• Apply Bayesian methods to reliability challenges including failure analysis, maintenance optimization, and performance modeling of complex systems.

Reliability engineers, data analysts in manufacturing and aerospace, and analytics professionals will find immediate, practical value. Graduate students and researchers in statistics, industrial engineering, bioengineering, and economics gain a structured, code-driven approach to Bayesian modeling and decision-making under real-world uncertainty.

David A. Hoeflin, PhD (Mathematics from Iowa State University), over his nearly thirty-year career, first at AT&T Bell Labs then AT&T Labs, rose to be a Director in the Optimization, Reliability and Customer Analytics department. He led the development of advanced statistical methods for network performance analysis, reliability engineering, and cybersecurity applications. He is a named inventor on multiple patents and has authored numerous peer-reviewed papers.

Michael Tortorella, PhD, retired as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, where he worked for 26 years. He subsequently worked as a Research Professor in the Rutgers Center for Operations Research (RUTCOR) at Rutgers University and as an Adjunct Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. He holds the Ph.D. in mathematics from Purdue University and is a recognized expert in reliability engineering and probabilistic methods for complex systems.

He is the author of the Wiley textbook Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability: Best Practices for Systems Engineers and has published extensively in reliability theory, engineering, and management, numerical analysis, and operations research.