Dirichlet Distribution - Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org  ## Metadata - Author: **en.wikipedia.org** - Full Title: Dirichlet Distribution - Wikipedia - Category: #articles - URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet_distribution ## Highlights - In probability and statistics, the Dirichlet distribution (after Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet), often denoted {\displaystyle \operatorname {Dir} ({\boldsymbol {\alpha }})}, is a family of continuous multivariate probability distributions parameterized by a vector {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\alpha }}} of positive reals. It is a multivariate generalization of the beta distribution,[1] hence its alternative name of multivariate beta distribution (MBD).[2] Dirichlet distributions are commonly used as prior distributions in Bayesian statistics, and in fact the Dirichlet distribution is the conjugate prior of the categorical distribution and multinomial distribution. The infinite-dimensional generalization of the Dirichlet distribution is the Dirichlet process.