The Reverend Thomas Bayes died 250 years ago this month. His grave, located near epidemiological centre of excellence St Mary's College, remains a point of pilgrimage for statisticians (of both Bayesian and Frequentist stripes) visiting London to this day. Because since then, Bayes Theorem has been the underpinning of predictive analytics applications from spam detection to medical alerts. There are several R packages that implement Bayesian techniques, including the naiveBayes function and the LearnBayes package.

This month, Revolution Analytics' partner IBM Netezza commemorates Bayes' contributions to Statistics with a series of videos on Bayes Theorem, its applications, and the implications for Big Data and predictive analytics. The series kicks off with the tribute to Thomas Bayes below.

IBM Netezza: The Man Behind the Bayesian Theorem