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Especially when facing reliability data with limited information (e.g., a small number of failures), there are strong motivations for using Bayesian inference methods. These include the option to use information from physics-of-failure or…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-27 Qinglong Tian , Colin Lewis-Beck , Jarad Niemi , William Meeker

Loss-based clustering methods, such as k-means and its variants, are standard tools for finding groups in data. However, the lack of quantification of uncertainty in the estimated clusters is a disadvantage. Model-based clustering based on…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-11 Tommaso Rigon , Amy H. Herring , David B. Dunson

Bayesian inference requires specification of a single, precise prior distribution, whereas frequentist inference only accommodates a vacuous prior. Since virtually every real-world application falls somewhere in between these two extremes,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-26 Ryan Martin

We present a new approach to semiparametric inference using corrected posterior distributions. The method allows us to leverage the adaptivity, regularization and predictive power of nonparametric Bayesian procedures to estimate…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-21 Andrew Yiu , Edwin Fong , Chris Holmes , Judith Rousseau

Opinion Dynamics lacks a theoretical basis. In this article, I propose to use a decision-theoretic framework, based on the updating of subjective probabilities, as that basis. We will see we get a basic tool for a better understanding of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2012-11-21 Andre C. R. Martins

Bayesian statistics has gained popularity in psychological research due to its intuitive uncertainty quantification and convenient information-updating rules. In many applications, however, prior distributions are introduced merely as…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Yang Liu , Jonathan P. Williams , Jan Hannig

Bayesian inference is limited in scope because it cannot be applied in idealized contexts where none of the hypotheses under consideration is true and because it is committed to always using the likelihood as a measure of evidential…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2019-09-17 Olav Benjamin Vassend

We propose a general framework for obtaining probabilistic solutions to PDE-based inverse problems. Bayesian methods are attractive for uncertainty quantification but assume knowledge of the likelihood model or data generation process. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-28 Youngsoo Baek , Wilkins Aquino , Sayan Mukherjee

In an ideal setting for Bayesian agents, a perfect description of the rules of the environment (i.e., the objective observation model) is available, allowing them to reason through the Bayesian posterior to update their beliefs in an…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-10 Tianjin Li

Loss-based updating, including generalized Bayes, Gibbs, and quasi-posteriors, replaces likelihoods by a user-chosen loss and produces a posterior-like distribution via exponential tilt. We give a decision-theoretic characterization that…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Kenichiro McAlinn , Kōsaku Takanashi

This paper studies the problem of distributed classification with a network of heterogeneous agents. The agents seek to jointly identify the underlying target class that best describes a sequence of observations. The problem is first…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-24 James Z. Hare , Cesar A. Uribe , Lance Kaplan , Ali Jadbabaie

In Bayesian statistics probability distributions express beliefs. However, for many problems the beliefs cannot be computed analytically and approximations of beliefs are needed. We seek a loss function that quantifies how "embarrassing" it…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-07 Reimar H. Leike , Torsten A. Enßlin

We propose a general method to carry out a valid Bayesian analysis of a finite-dimensional `targeted' parameter in the presence of a finite-dimensional nuisance parameter. We apply our methods to causal inference based on estimating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Magid Sabbagh , David A. Stephens

The proposed approach extends the confidence posterior distribution to the semi-parametric empirical Bayes setting. Whereas the Bayesian posterior is defined in terms of a prior distribution conditional on the observed data, the confidence…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-05-02 David R. Bickel

The notion of belief likelihood function of repeated trials is introduced, whenever the uncertainty for individual trials is encoded by a belief measure (a finite random set). This generalises the traditional likelihood function, and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-08-21 Fabio Cuzzolin

To estimate causal effects from observational data, an applied researcher must impose beliefs. The instrumental variables exclusion restriction, for example, represents the belief that the instrument has no direct effect on the outcome of…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-11-17 Francis J. DiTraglia , Camilo Garcia-Jimeno

The Bayes factor, the data-based updating factor of the prior to posterior odds of two hypotheses, is a natural measure of statistical evidence for one hypothesis over the other. We show how Bayes factors can also be used for parameter…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-09 Samuel Pawel

Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-12 Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Using observation data to estimate unknown parameters in computational models is broadly important. This task is often challenging because solutions are non-unique due to the complexity of the model and limited observation data. However,…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-18 Jiacheng Wu , Jian-Xun Wang , Shawn C. Shadden

In Generalised Bayesian Inference (GBI), the learning rate and hyperparameters of the loss must be estimated. These inference-hyperparameters can't be estimated jointly with the other parameters, from the data, by giving them a prior.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-18 Jeong Eun Lee , Sitong Liu , Geoff K. Nicholls