“All in all, the Bayesian argument for selecting the MAP model as the single ‘best’ model is suggestive but not compelling.” Last month, Jonty Rougier and Carey Priebe arXived a paper on Ockham’s factor, with a generalisation of a prior distribution acting as a regulariser, R(θ). Calling on the late David MacKay to argue that […]
Category: Bayesian model choice
O’Bayes 19/4
Last talks of the conference! With Rui Paulo (along with Gonzalo Garcia-Donato) considering the special case of factors when doing variable selection. Which is an interesting question that I had never considered, as at best I would remove all leves or keeping them all. Except that there may be misspecification in the factors as for […]
Siem Reap conference
As I returned from the conference in Siem Reap. on a flight avoiding India and Pakistan and their [brittle and bristling!] boundary on the way back, instead flying far far north, near Arkhangelsk (but with nothing to show for it, as the flight back was fully in the dark), I reflected how enjoyable this conference […]
a book and two chapters on mixtures
The Handbook of Mixture Analysis is now out! After a few years of planning, contacts, meetings, discussions about notations, interactions with authors, further interactions with late authors, repeating editing towards homogenisation, and a final professional edit last summer, this collection of nineteen chapters involved thirty-five contributors. I am grateful to all participants to this piece […]
Binomial vs Bernoulli
An interesting confusion on X validated where someone was convinced that using the Bernoulli representation of a sequence of Bernoulli experiments led to different posterior probabilities of two possible models than when using their Binomial representation. The confusion actually stemmed from using different conditionals, namely N¹=4,N²=1 in the first case (for a model M¹ with […]