Related papers: Looking for plausibility
By analyzing the relationships among chance, weight of evidence and degree of beliefwe show that the assertion "probability functions are special cases of belief functions" and the assertion "Dempster's rule can be used to combine belief…
Expectation is a central notion in probability theory. The notion of expectation also makes sense for other notions of uncertainty. We introduce a propositional logic for reasoning about expectation, where the semantics depends on the…
Possibilistic logic has been proposed as a numerical formalism for reasoning with uncertainty. There has been interest in developing qualitative accounts of possibility, as well as an explanation of the relationship between possibility and…
Topological models of empirical and formal inquiry are increasingly prevalent. They have emerged in such diverse fields as domain theory [1, 16], formal learning theory [18], epistemology and philosophy of science [10, 15, 8, 9, 2],…
We report an inconsistency found in probability theory (also referred to as measure-theoretic probability). For probability measures induced by real-valued random variables, we deduce an "equality" such that one side of the "equality" is a…
The conditioning in the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence has been defined (by Shafer \cite{Shafer:90} as combination of a belief function and of an "event" via Dempster rule. On the other hand Shafer \cite{Shafer:90} gives a…
Attempts to replicate probabilistic reasoning in expert systems have typically overlooked a critical ingredient of that process. Probabilistic analysis typically requires extensive judgments regarding interdependencies among hypotheses and…
The widely claimed replicability crisis in science may lead to revised standards of significance. The customary frequentist confidence intervals, calibrated through hypothetical repetitions of the experiment that is supposed to have…
The computational complexity of reasoning within the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence is one of the main points of criticism this formalism has to face. To overcome this difficulty various approximation algorithms have been suggested that…
Stemming from de Finetti's work on finitely additive coherent probabilities, the paradigm of coherence has been applied to many uncertainty calculi in order to remove structural restrictions on the domain of the assessment. Three possible…
An agent often has a number of hypotheses, and must choose among them based on observations, or outcomes of experiments. Each of these observations can be viewed as providing evidence for or against various hypotheses. All the attempts to…
The likelihood function represents statistical evidence in the context of data and a probability model. Considerable theory has demonstrated that evidence strength for different parameter values can be interpreted from the ratio of…
We revisit Zadeh's notion of "evidence of the second kind" and show that it provides the foundation for a general theory of epistemic random fuzzy sets, which generalizes both the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions and possibility…
Plausibility models are Kripke models that agents use to reason about knowledge and belief, both of themselves and of each other. Such models are used to interpret the notions of conditional belief, degrees of belief, and safe belief. The…
We provide a theoretical framework to understand how widely used measures of choice difficulty relate. In a binary-option Bayesian expected-utility framework, we show that three measures of difficulty, (i) understanding (ex-ante value),…
A recurring debate in the philosophy of statistics concerns what, exactly, should count as a measure of evidence for or against a given hypothesis. P-values, likelihood ratios, and Bayes factors all have their defenders. In this paper we…
The idea of fully accepting statements when the evidence has rendered them probable enough faces a number of difficulties. We leave the interpretation of probability largely open, but attempt to suggest a contextual approach to full belief.…
We describe a viewpoint on the Dempster/Shafer 'Theory of Evidence', and provide an interpretation which regards the combination formulas as statistics of the opinions of "experts". This is done by introducing spaces with binary operations…
This paper addresses fundamental issues on the nature of the concepts and structures of fuzzy logic, focusing, in particular, on the conceptual and functional differences that exist between probabilistic and possibilistic approaches. A…
There are various approaches to the problem of how one is supposed to conduct a statistical analysis. Different analyses can lead to contradictory conclusions in some problems so this is not a satisfactory state of affairs. It seems that…