News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Bayesian Neural Networks by dkga on Friday November 22, 2024 @01:13AM (#42211548)
I disagree with one conceptual point; if you are truly Bayesian you don’t “choose” a prior, by definition you “already have” a prior that you are updating with data to get to a posterior.
Re:Bayesian Neural Networks by abm53 on Friday November 22, 2024 @02:52AM (#42211942)
100% correct, but there are ways to push Bayesian inference back a step to justify this sort of thing.

It of course makes the problem even more complex and likely requires further approximations to computing the posterior (or even the MAP solution).

This stretches the notion that you are still doing Bayesian reasoning but can still lead to useful insights.

Re:Bayesian Neural Networks by DiscourseFan on Friday November 22, 2024 @03:48AM (#42212177)
Probably should just call it something else then; though, I gather that the simplicity of Bayes theorom belies the complexity of what it hides.
Re:Bayesian Neural Networks by hgomersall on Friday November 22, 2024 @02:47AM (#42211922)
At some level, you have to choose something. You can't know every level in your hierarchy.
Re:Bayesian Neural Networks by duvenaud on Friday November 22, 2024 @04:44PM (#42217613)
Sure, instead of saying "choose" a prior, you could say "elicit". But I think in this context, focusing on a practitioner's prior knowledge is missing the point. For the sorts of problems we use NNs for, we don't usually think that the guy designing the net has important knowledge that would help making good predictions. Choosing a prior is just an engineering challenge, where one has to avoid accidentally precluding plausible hypotheses.