Questions tagged [bayesian-probability]
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What does the KL being symmetric tell us about the distributions?
Suppose two probability density functions, $p$ and $q$, such that $\text{KL}(q||p) = \text{KL}(p||q) \neq 0$. Intuitively, does that tell us anything interesting about the nature of these densities?
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Who introduced the term hyperparameter?
I am trying to find the earliest use of the term hyperparameter. Currently, it is used in machine learning but it must have had earlier uses in statistics or optimization theory. Even the multivolume ...
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In what sense is the Bayesian posterior mean a “convex combination”?
I asked this on math.stackexchange with no response, I'm hoping someone here might have something.
Suppose I want to estimate $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ from two signals with zero mean, normally ...
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Rate of convergence of Bayesian posterior
Suppose a data generating process (DGP) is parameterized by some unknown parameter $\theta_0$, say $P_{\theta_0}$, and we want to estimate the value of $\theta_0$ using Bayesian method. Let $\pi(\...
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Base schemes and Bayesian priors
One of Grothendieck's dicta about algebraic geometry is to consider "the relative situation", where one doesn't consider the category of schemes but of schemes over a fixed base scheme.
In Bayesian ...
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What can be said about an infinite linear chain of conjugate prior distributions?
We can sample a discrete value from the multinomial distribution.
We can also sample the parameters of the multinomial distribution from its conjugate prior the dirichlet distribution.
Since the ...
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Existence of stick breaking representations for random measures
The Dirichlet process has a roughly size ordered representation in terms of beta random variables, called a stick-breaking representation (Sethuraman, 1994). Similar results hold for the beta process, ...
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Are all probabilities conditional probabilities? [closed]
We know that $P(A\mid B) = \frac{P(A \cap B)}{P(B)}$. So $P(B) = P(A\mid B)P(A \cap B)$. Thus are all probabilities conditional probabilities? Can one make a probability more accurate by introducing a ...
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Probability estimates for pairwise majority votes
This is related to the rank aggregation question I asked previously.
I have items $I_1, \ldots, I_N$ and the observations of a number of pairwise trials which pit pairs $I_i$ and $I_j$ against ...
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Bounding the sensitivity of a posterior mean to changes in a single data point
There is a real-valued random variable $R$. Define a finite set of random variables ("data points") $$X_i = R + Z_i \; \text{for } i\in\{1,\ldots,n\},$$ where $Z_i$ are identically and independently ...
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Do these distributions have a name already?
In playing with some math finance stuff I ran into the following distribution and I was curious if someone had a name for it or has studied it or worked with it already.
To start, let $\Delta^n$ be ...
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Gaussian process kernel parameter tuning
I am reading on gaussian processes and there are multiple resources that say how the parameters of the prior (kernel, mean) can be fitted based on data,specifically by choosing those that maximize the ...
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Convergence of the expectation of a random variable when conditioned on its sum with another, independent but not identically distributed
Suppose that for all $n \in \mathbf{N}$, $X_n$ and $Y_n$ are independent random variables with
$$X_n \sim \mathtt{Binomial}(n,1-q),$$
and
$$Y_n \sim \mathtt{Poisson}(n(q+\epsilon_n)),$$
where $q \in (...
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Bayesian Networks and Polytree
I am a bit puzzled by the use of polytree to infer a posterior in a Bayesian Network (BN).
BN are defined as directed acyclic graphs. A polytree is DAG whose underlying undirected graph is a tree. ...
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Parametrising a sparse orthogonal matrix
I need to find a way to parametrise a matrix that is both sparse (to some degree) and orthogonal, i.e., I am looking for a parametrisation that describes $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$ such that $AA^𝑇...
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