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# The Beta Family

The Beta distribution is a family of continuous distributions on \[0,1] with two parameters (commonly known as $$\alpha$$ and $$\beta$$, but also $$r$$ and $$s$$).

![Credit: Wikipedia](/files/3duQPWdv4Feka07EHJXQ)

Beta distributions are commonly used in situations where we want to continually update a prior distribution given new information.

* The `beta (1,1)` distribution is identical to the uniform distribution.

<http://prob140.org/textbook/content/Chapter_21/00_The_Beta_and_the_Binomial.html>