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The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed…
The issue of confidence factors in Knowledge Based Systems has become increasingly important and Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory has become increasingly popular as a basis for these factors. This paper discusses the need for an empirical…
Inferring the effect of interventions within complex systems is a fundamental problem of statistics. A widely studied approach employs structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables.…
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…
Causal belief is a cognitive practice that humans apply everyday to reason about cause and effect relations between factors, phenomena, or events. Like optical illusions, humans are prone to drawing causal relations between events that are…
A conceptual foundation for approximation of belief functions is proposed and investigated. It is based on the requirements of consistency and closeness. An optimal approximation is studied. Unfortunately, the computation of the optimal…
This paper formalizes religious epistemology through the mathematics of Variational Autoencoders. We model religious traditions as distinct generative mappings from a shared, low-dimensional latent space to the high-dimensional space of…
A common assumption in belief revision is that the reliability of the information sources is either given, derived from temporal information, or the same for all. This article does not describe a new semantics for integration but the…
Merging beliefs requires the plausibility of the sources of the information to be merged. They are typically assumed equally reliable in lack of hints indicating otherwise; yet, a recent line of research spun from the idea of deriving this…
A representative researcher has repeated opportunities for empirical research. To process findings, she must impose an "identifying assumption." She conducts research when the assumption is sufficiently plausible (taking into account both…
Religious adherence can be considered as a degree of freedom, in a statistical physics sense, for a human agent belonging to a population. The distribution, performance and life time of religions can thus be studied having in mind…
Exploratory factor analysis is often used in the social sciences to estimate potential measurement models. To do this, several important issues need to be addressed: (1) determining the number of factors, (2) learning constraints in the…
Probabilistic graphical models are a powerful concept for modeling high-dimensional distributions. Besides modeling distributions, probabilistic graphical models also provide an elegant framework for performing statistical inference;…
Causal probing aims to analyze foundation models by examining how intervening on their representation of various latent properties impacts their outputs. Recent works have cast doubt on the theoretical basis of several leading causal…
In the past two decades, psychological science has experienced an unprecedented replicability crisis which uncovered several issues. Among others, statistical inference is too often viewed as an isolated procedure limited to the analysis of…
Note: This paper includes examples of potentially offensive content related to religious bias, presented solely for academic purposes. The widespread adoption of language models highlights the need for critical examinations of their…
It is shown, with two sets of indicators that separately load on two distinct factors, independent of one another conditional on the past, that if it is the case that at least one of the factors causally affects the other, then, in many…
Objectives: The aim of this paper is to contrast the retrospective and prospective use of experts beliefs in choosing between survival models in economic evaluations. Methods: The use of experts retrospective (posterior) beliefs is…
Research and development in computer science and statistics have produced increasingly sophisticated software interfaces for interactive and exploratory analysis, optimized for easy pattern finding and data exposure. But design philosophies…
The problem of belief tracking in the presence of stochastic actions and observations is pervasive and yet computationally intractable. In this work we show however that probabilistic beliefs can be maintained in factored form exactly and…