Related papers: A note on the role of projectivity in likelihood-b…
Randomness in scientific estimation is generally assumed to arise from unmeasured or uncontrolled factors. However, when combining subjective probability estimates, heterogeneity stemming from people's cognitive or information diversity is…
The likelihood principle makes strong claims about the nature of statistical evidence but is controversial. Its claims are undermined by the existence of several examples that are assumed to show that it allows, with unity probability,…
Learning a parametric model from a given dataset indeed enables to capture intrinsic dependencies between random variables via a parametric conditional probability distribution and in turn predict the value of a label variable given…
We discuss a general definition of likelihood function in terms of Radon-Nikod\'{y}m derivatives. The definition is validated by the Likelihood Principle once we establish a result regarding the proportionality of likelihood functions under…
We develop a theory of estimation when in addition to a sample of $n$ observed outcomes the underlying probabilities of the observed outcomes are known, as is typically the case in the context of numerical simulation modeling, e.g. in…
In nature, most microbial populations have complex spatial structures that can affect their evolution. Evolutionary graph theory predicts that some spatial structures modelled by placing individuals on the nodes of a graph affect the…
Random utility theory models an agent's preferences on alternatives by drawing a real-valued score on each alternative (typically independently) from a parameterized distribution, and then ranking the alternatives according to scores. A…
To answer questions of "causes of effects", the probability of necessity is introduced for assessing whether or not an observed outcome was caused by an earlier treatment. However, the statistical inference for probability of necessity is…
The likelihood function is a fundamental component in Bayesian statistics. However, evaluating the likelihood of an observation is computationally intractable in many applications. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric approximation of…
We examine the issue of stability of probability in reasoning about complex systems with uncertainty in structure. Normally, propositions are viewed as probability functions on an abstract random graph where it is implicitly assumed that…
Increasingly complex generative models are being used across disciplines as they allow for realistic characterization of data, but a common difficulty with them is the prohibitively large computational cost to evaluate the likelihood…
Multivariate extreme value statistical analysis is concerned with observations on several variables which are thought to possess some degree of tail-dependence. In areas such as the modeling of financial and insurance risks, or as the…
Linear regression is a frequently used tool in statistics, however, its validity and interpretability relies on strong model assumptions. While robust estimates of the coefficients' covariance extend the validity of hypothesis tests and…
Machine learning models are often used to inform real world risk assessment tasks: predicting consumer default risk, predicting whether a person suffers from a serious illness, or predicting a person's risk to appear in court. Given…
The Plackett--Luce model has been extensively used for rank aggregation in social choice theory. A central statistical question in this model concerns estimating the utility vector that governs the model's likelihood. In this paper, we…
Autoregressive language models (LMs) map token sequences to probabilities. The usual practice for computing the probability of any character string (e.g. English sentences) is to first transform it into a sequence of tokens that is scored…
A projective network model is a model that enables predictions to be made based on a subsample of the network data, with the predictions remaining unchanged if a larger sample is taken into consideration. An exchangeable model is a model…
Monte Carlo methods to evaluate and maximize the likelihood function enable the construction of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, facilitating scientific investigation using models for which the likelihood function is intractable.…
We consider the problem of distribution-free predictive inference, with the goal of producing predictive coverage guarantees that hold conditionally rather than marginally. Existing methods such as conformal prediction offer marginal…
The inferential models (IM) framework provides prior-free, frequency-calibrated, posterior probabilistic inference. The key is the use of random sets to predict unobservable auxiliary variables connected to the observable data and unknown…