Machine Learning, etc

Thursday, March 10, 2005

The joy of scanning

I found a book scanner in our library's basement and decided to put it to good use by scanning some hard-to-find-online references on foundations of Bayesianism.
I included the last one because there are some parallels with philosophy of Bayesianism. Following Cox, one should be a Bayesian if
  1. They assume boolean logic
  2. Can encode their true belief as a pdf
On other hand, following Skilling, one should use ME principle if they
  1. Believe Skilling's axioms.
  2. Have statements about true distribution in the form of constraints.
In both models assumption number 1 sounds more or less reasonable, whereas assumption number 2 causes discontent. With Bayesian approach, we don't know how to represent our prior knowledge as a pdf, whereas with ME approach, we don't know where to get the constraints from. However, in practice, we can often find a pdf that is close to representing the true belief of the expert, and similarly we can often find constraints that approximately rule out unfeasible distributions.

Questions


BTW, if you are the author, and don't like the links to your work, let me know, and I'll remove them
posted by Yaroslav, 2:12 PM

7 Comments:

Good stuff, great work, thanx :D I've no idea about any other up to date overview of inductive methods but be sure if i see something interesting i'll post it here.
commented by Blogger JoSeK, 3:30 AM  
I agree -- item (2) is certainly the suspect one in each list. My main questions are: (a) How do experts typically mis-specify priors? (b) How sensitive is Bayesian inference to an incorrect prior?

Anyway, I just found a book at the library you may be interested in. Information, Inference, and Decision, edited by Menges (an apparently unpopular book; it had no bar code and was last checked out in 1978; this is the third time it's checked out at all!). I haven't looked at it closely enough to determine if the ideas are any good (I'm working on that UAI paper) but it may at least be relevant. (It's on my desk if you want to take a peek.)
commented by Blogger Eric Altendorf, 3:17 PM  
Thanks for the scans. We miss you, come back :(
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 4:39 PM  
Sounds interesting but the links no longer work. Do you still have the pdfs?
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 5:54 AM  
links are fixed
commented by Blogger Yaroslav, 9:51 AM  
The second and fourth link are not working as of today October 21, 2007.

Great and memorable post by the way ... I saw it a few years ago, but I knew I had to come back and read the papers.
commented by Blogger Mugizi, 6:32 PM  
Looks like I broke them when renaming the files to a more consistent naming standard, should be working now
commented by Blogger Yaroslav, 10:01 PM  

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