AlexaKhan comments on Bayesian Flame - Less Wrong

37 Post author: cousin_it 26 July 2009 04:49PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (155)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: AlexaKhan 28 July 2009 05:49:51PM *  5 points [-]

That's what Jaynes did to achieve his awesome victories: use trained intuition to pick good priors by hand on a per-sample basis.

... as if applying the classical method doesn't require using trained intuition to use the "right" method for a particular kind of problem, which amounts to choosing a prior but doing it implicitly rather than explicitly ...

Our inference is conditional on our assumptions [for example, the prior P(Lambda)]. Critics view such priors as a difficulty because they are `subjective', but I don't see how it could be otherwise. How can one perform inference without making assumptions? I believe that it is of great value that Bayesian methods force one to make these tacit assumptions explicit.

McKay, information theory, learning and inference

Comment author: cousin_it 04 August 2009 11:57:18AM *  1 point [-]

Frequentist methods often have mathematical justifications, so Bayesian priors should have them too.