Vol. 38, No. 1 (2025)

Issue in Progress

APL Research and Development

The Digest communicates recent advances by the Laboratory in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, along with expository articles by APL staff members that accelerate education and understanding of new capabilities, results, and discoveries. Research and development issues highlight APL’s broad, multidisciplinary contributions to critical national and global challenges.

In This Issue

Statistical Analysis (Credit: Bigstock)

Bayesian Statistics: An Introduction for the Practicing Reliability Engineer

Carsten H. Botts

This article introduces and reviews some of the principles and methods used in Bayesian reliability. It specifically discusses methods used in the analysis of success/no-success data and describes a simple Monte Carlo algorithm that can be used to calculate the posterior distribution of a system’s reliability. This algorithm is especially useful when a system’s reliability is modeled through the reliability of its subcomponents, yet only system-level data are available.