Related papers: Optimal Prior Pooling from Expert Opinions
Recent approaches to the problem of inferring a continuous probability distribution from a finite set of data have used a scalar field theory for the form of the prior probability distribution. This letter presents a more general form for…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
Sequential multi-class diagnosis, also known as multi-hypothesis testing, is a classical sequential decision problem with broad applications. However, the optimal solution remains, in general, unknown as the dynamic program suffers from the…
Based on expert opinions, informative prior elicitation for the common Weibull lifetime distribution usually presents some difficulties since it requires to elicit a two-dimensional joint prior. We consider here a reliability framework…
In this paper the problem of learning appropriate bias for an environment of related tasks is examined from a Bayesian perspective. The environment of related tasks is shown to be naturally modelled by the concept of an {\em objective}…
Gathering the most information by picking the least amount of data is a common task in experimental design or when exploring an unknown environment in reinforcement learning and robotics. A widely used measure for quantifying the…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…
In this paper, we propose a new data based model for influence maximization in online social networks. We use the theory of belief functions to overcome the data imperfection problem. Besides, the proposed model searches to detect…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
In many mobile health interventions, treatments should only be delivered in a particular context, for example when a user is currently stressed, walking or sedentary. Even in an optimal context, concerns about user burden can restrict which…
We present a novel method for mining opinions from text collections using generative language models trained on data collected from different populations. We describe the basic definitions, methodology and a generic algorithm for opinion…
The application of Bayesian inference for the purpose of model selection is very popular nowadays. In this framework, models are compared through their marginal likelihoods, or their quotients, called Bayes factors. However, marginal…
Berger et al. (2001) and Ren et al. (2012) derived noninformative priors for Gaussian process models of spatially correlated data using the reference prior approach (Berger, Bernardo, 1991). The priors have good statistical properties and…
A Bayesian belief network is a model of a joint distribution over a finite set of variables, with a DAG structure representing immediate dependencies among the variables. For each node, a table of parameters (CPtable) represents local…
How to efficiently and reliably spread information in a system is one of the most fundamental problems in distributed computing. Recently, inspired by biological scenarios, several works focused on identifying the minimal communication…
The proposed approach extends the confidence posterior distribution to the semi-parametric empirical Bayes setting. Whereas the Bayesian posterior is defined in terms of a prior distribution conditional on the observed data, the confidence…
Understanding differences of viewpoints across corpora is a fundamental task for computational social sciences. In this paper, we propose the Sliced Word Embedding Association Test (SWEAT), a novel statistical measure to compute the…
We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…
The power prior is a popular class of informative priors for incorporating information from historical data. It involves raising the likelihood for the historical data to a power, which acts as discounting parameter. When the discounting…