Abstract
We introduce a set of transformations on the set of all probability distributions over a finite state space, and show that these transformations are the only ones that preserve certain elementary probabilistic relationships. This result provides a new perspective on a variety of probabilistic inference problems in which invariance considerations play a role. Two particular applications we consider in this paper are the development of an equivariance-based approach to the problem of measure selection, and a new justification for Haldane’s prior as the distribution that encodes prior ignorance about the parameter of a multinomial distribution.
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Jaeger, M. (2003). A Representation Theorem and Applications. In: Nielsen, T.D., Zhang, N.L. (eds) Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty. ECSQARU 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2711. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45062-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45062-7_4
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