Links from Today's class + Bayesian brain..

["Subbarao Kambhampati" <rao@asu.edu>]

Links from Today's class + Bayesian brain..

      Here
is a link to an article in Economist about some research that seems to
show that people might be using prior distributions to make
predictions. The article also points out a more important
reason why
Bayes is considered big--Bayesian view in statistics allows predictions
even with little data, since it assumes that there may be a prior
distribution. Frequentists on the other hand distrust priors 
and depend only on the data. In practice this means that Bayesians can jump to conclusions with much less data. 

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5354696&no_na_tran=1 

(and here is a more technical paper on which that article is based: 
http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/Griffiths-Tenenbaum-PsychSci06.pdf  )

See also Wikipedia entry for Bayesian Probability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
 which makes it clear that a Bayesian does not tie  
probabilities
to relative frequencies--she is happy to give a probability to some
event such as "seeing a grue wearing green shorts". This view of
probability
is sometimes called "personal" probability. Bayesianism has come to dominate probability and statistics. 

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The Human Language series I mentioned is the series described at 
http://www.thehumanlanguage.com/page1.html

It is an eminently watchable video series. The ASU media library has copies of this video. 


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