Yaroslav_Bulatov comments on Trust in Bayes - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 January 2008 11:12PM

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Comment author: Yaroslav_Bulatov 31 January 2008 05:35:53PM 0 points [-]

Gray Area -- good question, thanks for bring my attention to reservoir sampling. I found a compact description of it in Devroye's "Non-Uniform ..." and for sampling just 1 integer x it looks as follows

1. At step 1, let x=1 2. At step k, let x=k with probability 1/k

sum_i 1/i diverges, this means x will never stop growing

pdf23ds -- I think you can use reservoir sampling for sampling from infinite streams, an interesting question is when it works. For instance, consider an infinite stream of IID bits, 1-element reservoir sampling converges after 1 step. An interesting question is when exactly it works -- my intuition is that it works whenever the stream has finite entropy, and a stationary Markov property