ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Pólya urn model

Imagine you have a big, magical jar that is filled with a bunch of colored balls, like red, blue, and green. Now, let's say we want to know how likely it is to pick out a red ball from the jar.

To figure this out, we can use something called the Pólya Urn Model. This model helps us understand how the probabilities of picking certain colors change over time as we keep pulling balls out of the jar.

Here's how it works: imagine that we start by pulling out one ball from the jar, and we record its color. Let's say it was a red ball.

Now, in the Pólya Urn Model, we take that red ball and put two more red balls back into the jar. So now, instead of one red ball, we have three red balls in the jar. We also have all the other colors, like blue and green, still in the jar as well.

The next time we pull out a ball, there's a slightly higher chance that it will be red, since there are more red balls in the jar than before. Let's say we do get another red ball. Now, we repeat the process of adding two more red balls back into the jar each time we pick a red ball.

As we keep repeating this process, the number of red balls in the jar grows and grows. Eventually, it becomes very likely that we'll pick out a red ball, since there are so many of them in the jar compared to the other colors.

But what if we start out with a jar that has a lot of different colors, and we don't know which one is more likely to be picked first? In that case, we can use the Pólya Urn Model to help us figure out which color will become more likely over time.

For example, if we start out with a jar that has 10 red balls, 5 blue balls, and 3 green balls, then we might expect to see more and more red balls being picked as we repeat the process of adding balls back into the jar based on the color we just picked.

So, in summary, the Pólya Urn Model is a way to understand how probabilities change over time as we keep picking balls out of a jar and adding more balls back into it. It helps us predict which colors are more likely to appear based on the number of balls of each color in the jar.