Related papers: Overcoming priors anxiety
QBism is currently one of the most widely discussed 'subjective' interpretations of quantum mechanics. Its key move is to say that quantum probabilities are personalist Bayesian probabilities and that the quantum state represents subjective…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
This introduction to Bayesian statistics presents the main concepts as well as the principal reasons advocated in favour of a Bayesian modelling. We cover the various approaches to prior determination as well as the basis asymptotic…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
Prior probabilities of clinical hypotheses are not systematically used for clinical trial design yet, due to a concern that poor priors may lead to poor decisions. To address this concern, a conservative approach to Bayesian trial design is…
Preprocessing forms an oft-neglected foundation for a wide range of statistical and scientific analyses. However, it is rife with subtleties and pitfalls. Decisions made in preprocessing constrain all later analyses and are typically…
Inference from limited data requires a notion of measure on parameter space, most explicit in the Bayesian framework as a prior. Here we demonstrate that Jeffreys prior, the best-known uninformative choice, introduces enormous bias when…
This chapter provides a overview of Bayesian inference, mostly emphasising that it is a universal method for summarising uncertainty and making estimates and predictions using probability statements conditional on observed data and an…
Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be…
In Bayesian statistics, one's prior beliefs about underlying model parameters are revised with the information content of observed data from which, using Bayes' rule, a posterior belief is obtained. A non-trivial example taken from the…
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…
A central concept in active inference is that the internal states of a physical system parametrise probability measures over states of the external world. These can be seen as an agent's beliefs, expressed as a Bayesian prior or posterior.…
The application of Bayesian methods in cosmology and astrophysics has flourished over the past decade, spurred by data sets of increasing size and complexity. In many respects, Bayesian methods have proven to be vastly superior to more…
After experimenting with a number of non-probabilistic methods for dealing with uncertainty many researchers reaffirm a preference for probability methods [1] [2], although this remains controversial. The importance of being able to form…
Difficulties over probability have often been considered fatal to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here I argue that the Everettian can have everything she needs from `probability' without recourse to indeterminism,…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…
There are two main opposing schools of statistical reasoning, Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Until recent days, the frequentist or classical approach has dominated the scientific research, but Bayesianism has reappeared with a strong…
Nowadays model uncertainty has become one of the most important problems in both academia and industry. In this paper, we mainly consider the scenario in which we have a common model set used for model averaging instead of selecting a…