Related papers: Justifying the Norms of Inductive Inference
Quantum theory can be viewed as a generalization of classical probability theory, but the analogy as it has been developed so far is not complete. Whereas the manner in which inferences are made in classical probability theory is…
We present locally complete inference rules for probabilistic deduction from taxonomic and probabilistic knowledge-bases over conjunctive events. Crucially, in contrast to similar inference rules in the literature, our inference rules are…
In many instances, the application of approximate Bayesian methods is hampered by two practical features: 1) the requirement to project the data down to low-dimensional summary, including the choice of this projection, which ultimately…
Statistical learning using imprecise probabilities is gaining more attention because it presents an alternative strategy for reducing irreplicable findings by freeing the user from the task of making up unwarranted high-resolution…
There are things we know, things we know we don't know, and then there are things we don't know we don't know. In this paper we address the latter two issues in a Bayesian framework, introducing the notion of doubt to quantify the degree of…
The usual reading of logical implication "A implies B" as "if A then B" fails in intuitionistic logic: there are formulas A and B such that "A implies B" is not provable, even though B is provable whenever A is provable. Intuitionistic…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
Bayesian statistics is an integral part of contemporary applied science. bayesics provides a single framework, unified in syntax and output, for performing the most commonly used statistical procedures, ranging from one- and two-sample…
There is currently a renewed interest in the Bayesian predictive approach to statistics. This paper offers a review on foundational concepts and focuses on predictive modeling, which by directly reasoning on prediction, bypasses inferential…
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…
Fisher's fiducial argument is widely viewed as a failed version of Neyman's theory of confidence limits. But Fisher's goal -- Bayesian-like probabilistic uncertainty quantification without priors -- was more ambitious than Neyman's, and…
With information systems becoming larger scale, recommendation systems are a topic of growing interest in machine learning research and industry. Even though progress on improving model design has been rapid in research, we argue that many…
Controlled experiments (A/B tests or randomized field experiments) are the de facto standard to make data-driven decisions when implementing changes and observing customer responses. The methodology to analyze such experiments should be…
Survey of several forms of updating, with a practical illustrative example. We study several updating (conditioning) schemes that emerge naturally from a common scenarion to provide some insights into their meaning. Updating is a subtle…
We introduce a general framework that extends Bayesian inference by allowing the researcher to explicitly encode confidence in each source of uncertainty within the model. This mechanism provides a new handle for model design and…
A Bayesian network is a widely used probabilistic graphical model with applications in knowledge discovery and prediction. Learning a Bayesian network (BN) from data can be cast as an optimization problem using the well-known…
In statistical practice, whether a Bayesian or frequentist approach is used in inference depends not only on the availability of prior information but also on the attitude taken toward partial prior information, with frequentists tending to…
We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…
We consider the common setting where one observes probability estimates for a large number of events, such as default risks for numerous bonds. Unfortunately, even with unbiased estimates, selecting events corresponding to the most extreme…
Statistical modeling can involve a tension between assumptions and statistical identification. The law of the observable data may not uniquely determine the value of a target parameter without invoking a key assumption, and, while…