To design bubbling fluidized bed reactors and study chemical reactions, the knowledge of hydrodynamic properties, such as bubble size, rise velocity and hold-up is of importance. Local measurements of those properties are valuable, but do not automatically reflect the properties of the full bed. In the manuscript a method based on Bayes' theorem is developed, which helps to transform local bubble rise velocity measurements into a global result. The transformation method was tested by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.