W.E. Johnson's 'Sufficientness' Postulate.

Abstract

How do Bayesians justify using conjugate priors on grounds other than mathematical convenience? In the 1920's the Cambridge philosopher William Ernest Johnson in effect characterized symmetric Dirichlet priors for multinomial sampling in terms of a natural and easily assessed subjective condition. Johnson's proof can be generalized to include asymmetric Dirichlet priors and those finitely exchangeable sequences with linear posterior expectation of success. Some interesting open problems that Johnson's result raises, and its historical and philosophical background are also discussed.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 22, 1984
Accession Number
ADA149014

Entities

People

  • S. L. Zabell

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Bayesian Inference
  • Bayesian Networks
  • California
  • Data Science
  • Frequency
  • Information Science
  • Military Research
  • New York
  • Philosophy
  • Probability
  • Random Variables
  • Sampling
  • Sequences
  • Statistical Inference
  • Statistics
  • Theorems
  • United States

Readers

  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Statistical inference.
  • Theoretical Analysis.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval