gwern comments on Beyond Bayesians and Frequentists - Less Wrong

36 Post author: jsteinhardt 31 October 2012 07:03AM

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Comment author: gwern 25 December 2012 11:20:16PM 2 points [-]

Another answer is the complete class theorem, which shows that any non-Bayesian decision procedure is strictly dominated by a Bayesian decision procedure --- meaning that the Bayesian procedure performs at least as well as the non-Bayesian procedure in all cases with certainty.

I don't understand the connection to the earlier claims about minimizing worst-case performance. To strictly dominate, doesn't this imply that the Bayesian algorithm does as well or better on the worst-case input? In which case, how does frequentism ever differ? Surely the complete class theorem doesn't show that all frequentist approaches are just a Bayesian approah in disguise?