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Related papers: Optimal Prior Pooling from Expert Opinions

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In opinion dynamics, as in general usage, polarisation is subjective. To understand polarisation, we need to develop more precise methods to measure the agreement in society. This paper presents four mathematical measures of polarisation…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-01-11 Johnathan A. Adams , Gentry White , Robyn P. Araujo

In this paper we leverage on probability over Riemannian manifolds to rethink the interpretation of priors and posteriors in Bayesian inference. The main mindshift is to move away from the idea that "a prior distribution establishes a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-03 Jesus Cerquides

This paper is concerned with the construction of prior free posterior distributions which rely on the use of one step ahead predictive distribution functions. These are typically more straightforward to motivate than prior distributions.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-23 Pier Giovanni Bissiri , Chris Holmes , Stephen G. Walker

In this work, we examine the problem of online decision making under uncertainty, which we formulate as planning in the belief space. Maintaining beliefs (i.e., distributions) over high-dimensional states (e.g., entire trajectories) was not…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Khen Elimelech , Vadim Indelman

In multi-objective decision planning and learning, much attention is paid to producing optimal solution sets that contain an optimal policy for every possible user preference profile. We argue that the step that follows, i.e, determining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Luisa M Zintgraf , Diederik M Roijers , Sjoerd Linders , Catholijn M Jonker , Ann Nowé

We study the problem of data integration from sources that contain probabilistic uncertain information. Data is modeled by possible-worlds with probability distribution, compactly represented in the probabilistic relation model. Integration…

Databases · Computer Science 2016-07-20 Fereidoon Sadri , Gayatri Tallur

Consider public health officials aiming to spread awareness about a new vaccine in a community interconnected by a social network. How can they distribute information with minimal resources, so as to avoid polarization and ensure…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Haolin Liu , Rajmohan Rajaraman , Ravi Sundaram , Anil Vullikanti , Omer Wasim , Haifeng Xu

This paper reviews background and examples of Bayesian predictive synthesis (BPS), and develops details in a subset of BPS mixture models. BPS expands on standard Bayesian model uncertainty analysis for model mixing to provide a broader…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-04 Matthew C. Johnson , Mike West

The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents,…

We study estimation of a class prior for unlabeled target samples which possibly differs from that of source population. Moreover, it is assumed that the source data is partially observable: only samples from the positive class and from the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Jan Mielniczuk , Wojciech Rejchel , Paweł Teisseyre

In many applications, a state-space model depends on a parameter which needs to be inferred from a data set. Quite often, it is necessary to perform the parameter inference online. In the maximum likelihood approach, this can be done using…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-01-05 Vladislav Z. B. Tadic , Arnaud Doucet

A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-10-11 Sven Banisch , Eckehard Olbrich

We propose a new clustering approach, called optimality-based clustering, that clusters data points based on their latent decision-making preferences. We assume that each data point is a decision generated by a decision-maker who…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Zahed Shahmoradi , Taewoo Lee

Eliciting informative prior distributions for Bayesian inference can often be complex and challenging. While popular methods rely on asking experts probability based questions to quantify uncertainty, these methods are not without their…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-11 Julia R. Falconer , Eibe Frank , Devon L. L. Polaschek , Chaitanya Joshi

We study the fundamental task of estimating the median of an underlying distribution from a finite number of samples, under pure differential privacy constraints. We focus on distributions satisfying the minimal assumption that they have a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-13 Christos Tzamos , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis , Ilias Zadik

This paper examines the statistical properties of a distributional form that arises from pooled testing for the prevalence of a binary outcome. Our base distribution is a two-parameter distribution using a prevalence and excess intensity…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-11 Ben O'Neill , Angus McLure

Consider $n$ items, each of which is characterised by one of $d+1$ possible features in $\{0, \ldots, d\}$. We study the inference task of learning these types by queries on subsets, or pools, of the items that only reveal a form of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Max Hahn-Klimroth , Noela Müller

Opinion mining and Sentiment analysis have emerged as a field of study since the widespread of World Wide Web and internet. Opinion refers to extraction of those lines or phrase in the raw and huge data which express an opinion. Sentiment…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2014-01-14 Deepali Virmani , Vikrant Malhotra , Ridhi Tyagi

Distributed algorithms for solving additive or consensus optimization problems commonly rely on first-order or proximal splitting methods. These algorithms generally come with restrictive assumptions and at best enjoy a linear convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-11 Sina Khoshfetrat Pakazad , Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Anders Hansson

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin