An Explanatory Rationale for Priors Sharpened Into Occam's Razors

被引:4
|
作者
Bickel, David R. [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Ottawa, Ottawa Inst Syst Biol, Dept Biochem Microbiol & Immunol, Dept Math & Stat, 451 Smyth Rd, Ottawa, ON K1H 8M5, Canada
来源
BAYESIAN ANALYSIS | 2020年 / 15卷 / 04期
基金
加拿大自然科学与工程研究理事会;
关键词
explanatory coherence; foundations of Bayesian statistics; informative prior distribution; objective Bayes; objective prior distribution; Ockham's razor; simplicity postulate; sharpened prior distribution;
D O I
10.1214/19-BA1189
中图分类号
O1 [数学];
学科分类号
0701 ; 070101 ;
摘要
In Bayesian statistics, if the distribution of the data is unknown, then each plausible distribution of the data is indexed by a parameter value, and the prior distribution of the parameter is specified. To the extent that more complicated data distributions tend to require more coincidences for their construction than simpler data distributions, default prior distributions should be transformed to assign additional prior probability or probability density to the parameter values that refer to simpler data distributions. The proposed transformation of the prior distribution relies on the entropy of each data distribution as the relevant measure of complexity. The transformation is derived from a few first principles and extended to stochastic processes.
引用
收藏
页码:1299 / 1321
页数:23
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