English

Objective Bayesian approach to the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox

Methodology 2022-04-15 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

We consider the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox from an objective Bayesian perspective by attempting to find priors representing complete indifference to sample size in the problem. This means that we ensure that the prior for the unknown mean and the prior predictive for the tt-statistic are independent of the sample size. If successful, this would lead to Bayesian model comparison that was independent of sample size and ameliorate the paradox. Unfortunately, it leads to an improper scale-invariant prior for the unknown mean. We show, however, that a truncated scale-invariant prior delays the dependence on sample size, which could be practically significant. Lastly, we shed light on the paradox by relating it to the fact that the scale-invariant prior is improper.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.04879,
  title  = {Objective Bayesian approach to the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox},
  author = {Andrew Fowlie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.04879},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure, added one comment and reference

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:50:11.985Z