Related papers: On the non-arbitrary assignment of equi-probable p…
Since its introduction by Fisher, the method of hypothesis testing that relies on computing error probabilities has witnessed several developments. Perhaps the most significant development was the seminal contributions of Neyman and Pearson…
It is curious to learn that Enrico Fermi knew how to base probabilistic inference on Bayes theorem, and that some influential notes on statistics for physicists stem from what the author calls elsewhere, but never in these notes, {\it the…
The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the…
In designed experiments and surveys, known laws or design feat ures provide checks on the most relevant aspects of a model and identify the target parameters. In contrast, in most observational studies in the health and social sciences, the…
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…
Preferential sampling has attracted considerable attention in geostatistics since the pioneering work of Diggle et al. (2010). A variety of likelihood-based approaches have been developed to correct estimation bias by explicitly modelling…
A considerable body of work in AI has been concerned with aggregating measures of confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence for a common set of propositions. Claiming classical probability to be inadequate or inappropriate, several…
Stochastic independence has a complex status in probability theory. It is not part of the definition of a probability measure, but it is nonetheless an essential property for the mathematical development of this theory. Bayesian decision…
A Bayesian nonparametric approach to the study of species diversity based on choosing a random discrete distribution as a prior model for the unknown relative abundances of species has been recently introduced in Lijoi et al. (2007, 2008).…
Starting with a likelihood or preference order on worlds, we extend it to a likelihood ordering on sets of worlds in a natural way, and examine the resulting logic. Lewis (1973) earlier considered such a notion of relative likelihood in the…
There is evidence that the numbers in probabilistic inference don't really matter. This paper considers the idea that we can make a probabilistic model simpler by making fewer distinctions. Unfortunately, the level of a Bayesian network…
Given i.i.d. data from an unknown distribution, we consider the problem of predicting future items. An adaptive way to estimate the probability density is to recursively subdivide the domain to an appropriate data-dependent granularity. A…
This paper is concerned with Bayesian inference when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We propose an annealed importance sampling procedure for estimating expectations with respect to the posterior.…
Causal inference with observational data can be performed under an assumption of no unobserved confounders (unconfoundedness assumption). There is, however, seldom clear subject-matter or empirical evidence for such an assumption. We…
Subclassification estimators are one of the methods used to estimate causal effects of interest using the propensity score. This method is more stable compared to other weighting methods, such as inverse probability weighting estimators, in…
Proposed derivations of the Born rule for Everettian theory are controversial. I argue that they are unnecessary but may provide justification for a simplified version of the Principal Principle. It's also unnecessary to replace Everett's…
Cromwell's rule (also known as the zero priors paradox) refers to the constraint of classical probability theory that if one assigns a prior probability of 0 or 1 to a hypothesis, then the posterior has to be 0 or 1 as well (this is a…
Bayesian field theory denotes a nonparametric Bayesian approach for learning functions from observational data. Based on the principles of Bayesian statistics, a particular Bayesian field theory is defined by combining two models: a…
Bayesian model selection with improper priors is not well-defined because of the dependence of the marginal likelihood on the arbitrary scaling constants of the within-model prior densities. We show how this problem can be evaded by…
It is commonly-accepted wisdom that more information is better, and that information should never be ignored. Here we argue, using both a Bayesian and a non-Bayesian analysis, that in some situations you are better off ignoring information…