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Conditional Independence
In probability theory, conditional independence describes situations wherein an observation is irrelevant or redundant when evaluating the certainty of a hypothesis. Conditional independence is usually formulated in terms of conditional probability, as a special case where the probability of the hypothesis given the uninformative observation is equal to the probability without. If A is the hypothesis, and B and C are observations, conditional independence can be stated as an equality: :P(A\mid B,C) = P(A \mid C) where P(A \mid B, C) is the probability of A given both B and C. Since the probability of A given C is the same as the probability of A given both B and C, this equality expresses that B contributes nothing to the certainty of A. In this case, A and B are said to be conditionally independent given C, written symbolically as: (A \perp\!\!\!\perp B \mid C). The concept of conditional independence is essential to graph-based theories of statistical inference, as it establ ...
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Probability Theory
Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set of axioms. Typically these axioms formalise probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure taking values between 0 and 1, termed the probability measure, to a set of outcomes called the sample space. Any specified subset of the sample space is called an event. Central subjects in probability theory include discrete and continuous random variables, probability distributions, and stochastic processes (which provide mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic or uncertain processes or measured quantities that may either be single occurrences or evolve over time in a random fashion). Although it is not possible to perfectly predict random events, much can be said about their behavior. Two major results in probability ...
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Referendum
A referendum (plural: referendums or less commonly referenda) is a direct vote by the electorate on a proposal, law, or political issue. This is in contrast to an issue being voted on by a representative. This may result in the adoption of a new policy or specific law, or the referendum may be only advisory. In some countries, it is synonymous with or commonly known by other names including plebiscite, votation, popular consultation, ballot question, ballot measure, or proposition. Some definitions of 'plebiscite' suggest it is a type of vote to change the constitution or government of a country. The word, 'referendum' is often a catchall, used for both legislative referrals and initiatives. Etymology 'Referendum' is the gerundive form of the Latin verb , literally "to carry back" (from the verb , "to bear, bring, carry" plus the inseparable prefix , here meaning "back"Marchant & Charles, Cassell's Latin Dictionary, 1928, p. 469.). As a gerundive is an adjective,A gerundiv ...
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De Finetti's Theorem
In probability theory, de Finetti's theorem states that exchangeable observations are conditionally independent relative to some latent variable. An epistemic probability distribution could then be assigned to this variable. It is named in honor of Bruno de Finetti. For the special case of an exchangeable sequence of Bernoulli random variables it states that such a sequence is a "mixture" of sequences of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Bernoulli random variables. A sequence of random variables is called exchangeable if the joint distribution of the sequence is unchanged by any permutation of the indices. While the variables of the exchangeable sequence are not ''themselves'' independent, only exchangeable, there is an ''underlying'' family of i.i.d. random variables. That is, there are underlying, generally unobservable, quantities that are i.i.d. – exchangeable sequences are mixtures of i.i.d. sequences. Background A Bayesian statistician often seeks the co ...
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Conditional Dependence
In probability theory, conditional dependence is a relationship between two or more events that are dependent when a third event occurs.Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, 201"Unit 3: Conditional Dependence"/ref> For example, if A and B are two events that individually increase the probability of a third event C, and do not directly affect each other, then initially (when it has not been observed whether or not the event C occurs) \operatorname(A \mid B) = \operatorname(A) \quad \text \quad \operatorname(B \mid A) = \operatorname(B) (A \text B are independent). But suppose that now C is observed to occur. If event B occurs then the probability of occurrence of the event A will decrease because its positive relation to C is less necessary as an explanation for the occurrence of C (similarly, event A occurring will decrease the probability of occurrence of B). Hence, now the two events A and B are conditionally negatively dependent on each o ...
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Law Of Total Probability
In probability theory, the law (or formula) of total probability is a fundamental rule relating marginal probabilities to conditional probabilities. It expresses the total probability of an outcome which can be realized via several distinct events, hence the name. Statement The law of total probability isZwillinger, D., Kokoska, S. (2000) ''CRC Standard Probability and Statistics Tables and Formulae'', CRC Press. page 31. a theorem that states, in its discrete case, if \left\ is a finite or countably infinite partition of a sample space (in other words, a set of pairwise disjoint events whose union is the entire sample space) and each event B_n is measurable, then for any event A of the same probability space: :P(A)=\sum_n P(A\cap B_n) or, alternatively, :P(A)=\sum_n P(A\mid B_n)P(B_n), where, for any n for which P(B_n) = 0 these terms are simply omitted from the summation, because P(A\mid B_n) is finite. The summation can be interpreted as a weighted average, and consequ ...
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Graphoid
A graphoid is a set of statements of the form, "''X'' is irrelevant to ''Y'' given that we know ''Z''" where ''X'', ''Y'' and ''Z'' are sets of variables. The notion of "irrelevance" and "given that we know" may obtain different interpretations, including probabilistic, relational and correlational, depending on the application. These interpretations share common properties that can be captured by paths in graphs (hence the name "graphoid"). The theory of graphoids characterizes these properties in a finite set of axioms that are common to informational irrelevance and its graphical representations. History Judea Pearl and Azaria Paz coined the term "graphoids" after discovering that a set of axioms that govern conditional independence in probability theory is shared by undirected graphs. Variables are represented as nodes in a graph in such a way that variable sets ''X'' and ''Y'' are independent conditioned on ''Z'' in the distribution whenever node set ''Z'' separates ''X'' f ...
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Journal Of The Royal Statistical Society, Series B
The ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of statistics. It comprises three series and is published by Wiley for the Royal Statistical Society. History The Statistical Society of London was founded in 1834, but would not begin producing a journal for four years. From 1834 to 1837, members of the society would read the results of their studies to the other members, and some details were recorded in the proceedings. The first study reported to the society in 1834 was a simple survey of the occupations of people in Manchester, England. Conducted by going door-to-door and inquiring, the study revealed that the most common profession was mill-hands, followed closely by weavers. When founded, the membership of the Statistical Society of London overlapped almost completely with the statistical section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1837 a volume of ''Transactions of the Statistical Society of London'' were wri ...
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Probability Distribution
In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes for an experiment. It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events (subsets of the sample space). For instance, if is used to denote the outcome of a coin toss ("the experiment"), then the probability distribution of would take the value 0.5 (1 in 2 or 1/2) for , and 0.5 for (assuming that the coin is fair). Examples of random phenomena include the weather conditions at some future date, the height of a randomly selected person, the fraction of male students in a school, the results of a survey to be conducted, etc. Introduction A probability distribution is a mathematical description of the probabilities of events, subsets of the sample space. The sample space, often denoted by \Omega, is the set of all possible outcomes of a random phe ...
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Bayesian Inference
Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and especially in mathematical statistics. Bayesian updating is particularly important in the dynamic analysis of a sequence of data. Bayesian inference has found application in a wide range of activities, including science, engineering, philosophy, medicine, sport, and law. In the philosophy of decision theory, Bayesian inference is closely related to subjective probability, often called "Bayesian probability". Introduction to Bayes' rule Formal explanation Bayesian inference derives the posterior probability as a consequence of two antecedents: a prior probability and a "likelihood function" derived from a statistical model for the observed data. Bayesian inference computes the posterior probability according to Bayes' theorem: ...
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Statistical Independence
Independence is a fundamental notion in probability theory, as in statistics and the theory of stochastic processes. Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if, informally speaking, the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other or, equivalently, does not affect the odds. Similarly, two random variables are independent if the realization of one does not affect the probability distribution of the other. When dealing with collections of more than two events, two notions of independence need to be distinguished. The events are called pairwise independent if any two events in the collection are independent of each other, while mutual independence (or collective independence) of events means, informally speaking, that each event is independent of any combination of other events in the collection. A similar notion exists for collections of random variables. Mutual independence implies pairwise independence ...
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Statistical Inference
Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying probability distribution, distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers properties of a Statistical population, population, for example by testing hypotheses and deriving estimates. It is assumed that the observed data set is Sampling (statistics), sampled from a larger population. Inferential statistics can be contrasted with descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics is solely concerned with properties of the observed data, and it does not rest on the assumption that the data come from a larger population. In machine learning, the term ''inference'' is sometimes used instead to mean "make a prediction, by evaluating an already trained model"; in this context inferring properties of the model is referred to as ''training'' or ''learning'' (rather than ''inference''), and using a model for ...
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Frequency Probability
Frequentist probability or frequentism is an interpretation of probability; it defines an event's probability as the limit of a sequence, limit of its relative Frequency_(statistics), frequency in many trials (the long-run probability). Probabilities can be found (in principle) by a repeatable objective process (and are thus ideally devoid of opinion). The continued use of frequentist methods in scientific inference, however, has been called into question. The development of the frequentist account was motivated by the problems and paradoxes of the previously dominant viewpoint, the Classical definition of probability, classical interpretation. In the classical interpretation, probability was defined in terms of the principle of indifference, based on the natural symmetry of a problem, so, ''e.g.'' the probabilities of dice games arise from the natural symmetric 6-sidedness of the cube. This classical interpretation stumbled at any statistical problem that has no natural symmetr ...
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