Consider flipping a coin for which the probability of heads is p, where p is...

Smooth the estimates: consider flipping a coin for which the probability of heads is p, where p is unknown, and our goal is to estimate p. The obvious approach is to count how many times the coin came up heads and divide by the total number of coin flips. If we flip the coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 367 times, it is very reasonable to estimate p as approximately 0.367. However, suppose we flip the coin only twice and we get heads both times. Is it reasonable to estimate p as 1.0? Intuitively, given that we only flipped the coin twice, it seems a bit rash to conclude that the coin will always come up heads, and smoothing is a way of avoiding such rash conclusions. A simple smoothing method, called Laplace smoothing (or Laplace's law of succession or add-one smoothing in R&N), is to estimate p by (one plus the number of heads) / (two plus the total number of flips). Said differently, if we are keeping count of the number of heads and the number of tails, this rule is equivalent to starting each of our counts at one, rather than zero. Another advantage of Laplace smoothing is that it avoids estimating any probabilities to be zero, even for events never observed in the data. Laplace add-one smoothing now assigns too much probability to unseen words