相关论文: Jeffreys priors versus experienced physicist prior…

The choice of priors may become an insoluble problem if priors and Bayes' rule are not seen and accepted in the framework of subjectivism. Therefore, the meaning and the role of subjectivity in science is considered and defended from the…

Bayesian methods are increasingly applied in these days in the theory and practice of statistics. Any Bayesian inference depends on a likelihood and a prior. Ideally one would like to elicit a prior from related sources of information or…

Objective priors for sequential experiments are considered. Common priors, such as the Jeffreys prior and the reference prior, will typically depend on the stopping rule used for the sequential experiment. New expressions for reference…

Bayesian inference --- although becoming popular in physics and chemistry --- is hampered up to now by the vagueness of its notion of prior probability. Some of its supporters argue that this vagueness is the unavoidable consequence of the…

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…

A key sticking point of Bayesian analysis is the choice of prior distribution, and there is a vast literature on potential defaults including uniform priors, Jeffreys' priors, reference priors, maximum entropy priors, and weakly informative…

We argue that the Bayesian paradigm, of a prior which represents the beliefs of the statistician before observing the data, is not feasible in ultra-high-dimensional models. We claim that natural priors that represent the a priori beliefs…

When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…

One of the key elements of probabilistic seismic risk assessment studies is the fragility curve, which represents the conditional probability of failure of a mechanical structure for a given scalar measure derived from seismic ground…

In a Perspectives article in Science, Bradley Efron concludes that Bayesian calculations cannot be uncritically accepted when using uninformative priors. We argue that this conclusion is problematic because Efron's example does not use…

The ratio of Bayesian evidences is a popular tool in cosmology to compare different models. There are however several issues with this method: Bayes' ratio depends on the prior even in the limit of non-informative priors, and Jeffrey's…

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…

We marshall the arguments for preferring Bayesian hypothesis testing and confidence sets to frequentist ones. We define admissible solutions to inference problems, noting that Bayesian solutions are admissible. We give seven weaker…

Priors in which a large number of parameters are specified to be independent are dangerous; they make it hard to learn from data. I present a couple of examples from the literature and work through a bit of large sample theory to show what…

While Jeffreys priors usually are well-defined for the parameters of mixtures of distributions, they are not available in closed form. Furthermore, they often are improper priors. Hence, they have never been used to draw inference on the…

In this paper we introduce objective proper prior distributions for hypothesis testing and model selection based on measures of divergence between the competing models; we call them divergence based (DB) priors. DB priors have simple forms…

Informative Bayesian priors are often difficult to elicit, and when this is the case, modelers usually turn to noninformative or objective priors. However, objective priors such as the Jeffreys and reference priors are not tractable to…

Study of the bivariate normal distribution raises the full range of issues involving objective Bayesian inference, including the different types of objective priors (e.g., Jeffreys, invariant, reference, matching), the different modes of…

In Bayesian analysis, reference priors are widely recognized for their objective nature. Yet, they often lead to intractable and improper priors, which complicates their application. Besides, informed prior elicitation methods are penalized…

To include parameter uncertainty into probabilistic climate forecasts one must first specify a prior. We advocate the use of objective priors, and, in particular, the Jeffreys' Prior. In previous work we have derived expressions for the…