相关论文: Overcoming priors anxiety

I review the problem of the choice of the priors from the point of view of a physicist interested in measuring a physical quantity, and I try to show that the reference priors often recommended for the purpose (Jeffreys priors) do not fit…

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…

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…

The problem of the priors is well known: it concerns the challenge of identifying norms that govern one's prior credences. I argue that a key to addressing this problem lies in considering what I call the problem of the posteriors -- the…

In quantum Bayesian inference problems, any conclusions drawn from a finite number of measurements depend not only on the outcomes of the measurements but also on a prior. Here we show that, in general, the prior remains important even in…

A common concern with Bayesian methodology in scientific contexts is that inferences can be heavily influenced by subjective biases. As presented here, there are two types of bias for some quantity of interest: bias against and bias in…

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…

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…

This contribution to the debate on confidence limits focuses mostly on the case of measurements with `open likelihood', in the sense that it is defined in the text. I will show that, though a prior-free assessment of {\it confidence} is, in…

Specifying a Bayesian prior is notoriously difficult for complex models such as neural networks. Reasoning about parameters is made challenging by the high-dimensionality and over-parameterization of the space. Priors that seem benign and…

Bayesian statistics is based on the subjective definition of probability as {\it ``degree of belief''} and on Bayes' theorem, the basic tool for assigning probabilities to hypotheses combining {\it a priori} judgements and experimental…

A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…

Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…

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…

Criticisms of so called `subjective probability' come on the one hand from those who maintain that probability in physics has only a frequentistic interpretation, and, on the other, from those who tend to `objectivise' Bayesian theory,…

Bayesian probability theory is used as a framework to develop a formalism for the scientific method based on principles of inductive reasoning. The formalism allows for precise definitions of the key concepts in theories of physics and also…

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…

Although hypothesis tests play a prominent role in Science, their interpretation can be challenging. Three issues are (i) the difficulty in making an assertive decision based on the output of an hypothesis test, (ii) the logical…