Related papers: Things Bayes can't do
For nearly any challenging scientific problem evaluation of the likelihood is problematic if not impossible. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) allows us to employ the whole Bayesian formalism to problems where we can use simulations…
We develop a representation of a decision maker's uncertainty based on e-variables. Like the Bayesian posterior, this *e-posterior* allows for making predictions against arbitrary loss functions that may not be specified ex ante. Unlike the…
The problem of nonparametric estimation of the conditional density of a response, given a vector of explanatory variables, is classical and of prominent importance in many prediction problems since the conditional density provides a more…
Bayesian inference gets its name from *Bayes's theorem*, expressing posterior probabilities for hypotheses about a data generating process as the (normalized) product of prior probabilities and a likelihood function. But Bayesian inference…
This introduction to Bayesian statistics presents the main concepts as well as the principal reasons advocated in favour of a Bayesian modelling. We cover the various approaches to prior determination as well as the basis asymptotic…
Constraints are a natural choice for prior information in Bayesian inference. In various applications, the parameters of interest lie on the boundary of the constraint set. In this paper, we use a method that implicitly defines a…
Conformal prediction (CP) is widely presented as distribution-free predictive inference with finite-sample marginal coverage under exchangeability. We argue that CP is best understood as a rank-calibrated descendant of the…
The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a…
If we could define the set of all bad outcomes, we could hard-code an agent which avoids them; however, in sufficiently complex environments, this is infeasible. We do not know of any general-purpose approaches in the literature to avoiding…
Naive Bayes classifiers have proven to be useful in many prediction problems with complete training data. Here we consider the situation where a naive Bayes classifier is trained with data where the response is right censored. Such…
This paper investigates the {\em nonasymptotic} properties of Bayes procedures for estimating an unknown distribution from $n$ i.i.d.\ observations. We assume that the prior is supported by a model $(\scr{S},h)$ (where $h$ denotes the…
In M-open problems where no true model can be conceptualized, it is common to back off from modeling and merely seek good prediction. Even in M-complete problems, taking a predictive approach can be very useful. Stacking is a model…
The human brain copes with sensory uncertainty in accordance with Bayes' rule. However, it is unknown how the brain makes predictions in the presence of parameter uncertainty. Here, we tested whether and how humans take parameter…
Bayesian sequence prediction is a simple technique for predicting future symbols sampled from an unknown measure on infinite sequences over a countable alphabet. While strong bounds on the expected cumulative error are known, there are only…
Sequential Bayesian inference can be used for continual learning to prevent catastrophic forgetting of past tasks and provide an informative prior when learning new tasks. We revisit sequential Bayesian inference and test whether having…
We study the Gaussian sequence compound decision problem and analyze a Bayesian nonparametric estimator from an empirical Bayes, regret-based perspective. Motivated by sharp results for the classical nonparametric maximum likelihood…
Bayes' theorem incorporates distinct types of information through the likelihood and prior. Direct observations of state variables enter the likelihood and modify posterior probabilities through consistent updating. Information in terms of…
In data science and machine learning, hierarchical parametric models, such as mixture models, are often used. They contain two kinds of variables: observable variables, which represent the parts of the data that can be directly measured,…
Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the {\it selection fallacy} that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by…
We theoretically justify the recent empirical finding of [Teh et al., 2025] that a transformer pretrained on synthetically generated data achieves strong performance on empirical Bayes (EB) problems. We take an indirect approach to this…