Bayesians Moving from Defense to Offense

Re:Bayesians Moving from Defense to Offense by im3w1l on Saturday December 23, 2023 @08:42PM (#38750252)

I think the attraction of Bayesianism is kind of philosophical / aesethetical, it is is principled and sound and beautiful approach. It's kinda nice that it kinda extends and translates occams razors into numbers.

Yes frequentist statistics work very well in practice, but it's a bit adhoc and suffers from various problems like say if you estimate velocity and estimate kinetic energy, you get values that are incompatible which is kinda ugly and non-intuitive and makes you want to dig deeper into how such a thing happened.

Bayesianism has the answers.

Also sometimes it really does matter like in medicine, where some conditions have a very low prior probability.

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Re:Bayesians Moving from Defense to Offense by jgalt212 on Saturday December 23, 2023 @09:22PM (#38750495)

> but it's a bit adhoc

That's how many people feel about Bayesian methods when trying to pick an initial prior.

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Re:Bayesians Moving from Defense to Offense by im3w1l on Saturday December 23, 2023 @10:33PM (#38750850)

I mean that's what's so good about them. The prior is a bit arbitrary and up for discussion. And Bayesianism is honest about it, it highlights that fact rather than trying to play fast and loose and sweep the issue under the rug.

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