Related papers: Bayes factors with (overly) informative priors

Prior specification for nonparametric Bayesian inference involves the difficult task of quantifying prior knowledge about a parameter of high, often infinite, dimension. Realistically, a statistician is unlikely to have informed opinions…

The choice of priors may become an insoluble problem if priors and Bayes' rule are not seen and accepted in the framework of subjectivism. Therefore, the meaning and the role of subjectivity in science is considered and defended from the…

It is often claimed that Bayesian methods, in particular Bayes factor methods for hypothesis testing, can deal with optional stopping. We first give an overview, using elementary probability theory, of three different mathematical meanings…

Bayesian methods are increasingly applied in these days in the theory and practice of statistics. Any Bayesian inference depends on a likelihood and a prior. Ideally one would like to elicit a prior from related sources of information or…

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.…

We argue that the Bayesian paradigm, of a prior which represents the beliefs of the statistician before observing the data, is not feasible in ultra-high-dimensional models. We claim that natural priors that represent the a priori beliefs…

Prior distributions elicited for modelling the natural fluctuations or the uncertainty on parameters of Bayesian fishery population models, can be chosen among a vast range of statistical laws. Since the statistical framework is defined by…

Hierarchical models are versatile tools for joint modeling of data sets arising from different, but related, sources. Fully Bayesian inference may, however, become computationally prohibitive if the source-specific data models are complex,…

Bayesian model comparison is often based on the posterior distribution over the set of compared models. This distribution is often observed to concentrate on a single model even when other measures of model fit or forecasting ability…

Recently, optional stopping has been a subject of debate in the Bayesian psychology community. Rouder (2014) argues that optional stopping is no problem for Bayesians, and even recommends the use of optional stopping in practice, as do…

Following the critical review of Seaman et al. (2012), we reflect on what is presumably the most essential aspect of Bayesian statistics, namely the selection of a prior density. In some cases, Bayesian inference remains fairly stable under…

Across the empirical sciences, few statistical procedures rival the popularity of the frequentist t-test. In contrast, the Bayesian versions of the t-test have languished in obscurity. In recent years, however, the theoretical and practical…

Bayes factors represent the ratio of probabilities assigned to data by competing scientific hypotheses. Drawbacks of Bayes factors are their dependence on prior specifications that define null and alternative hypotheses and difficulties…

We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…

Bayes factors for composite hypotheses have difficulty in encoding vague prior knowledge, as improper priors cannot be used and objective priors may be subjectively unreasonable. To address these issues I revisit the posterior Bayes factor,…

Recent works have investigated deep learning models trained by optimising PAC-Bayes bounds, with priors that are learnt on subsets of the data. This combination has been shown to lead not only to accurate classifiers, but also to remarkably…

Every philosophy has holes, and it is the responsibility of proponents of a philosophy to point out these problems. Here are a few holes in Bayesian data analysis: (1) the usual rules of conditional probability fail in the quantum realm,…

When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…

In a bivariate meta-analysis the number of diagnostic studies involved is often very low so that frequentist methods may result in problems. Bayesian inference is attractive as informative priors that add small amount of information can…

We marshall the arguments for preferring Bayesian hypothesis testing and confidence sets to frequentist ones. We define admissible solutions to inference problems, noting that Bayesian solutions are admissible. We give seven weaker…