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Whether or not they understand Bayes, some groups of people are more concerned about what their posteriors will become proportional to whether they choose pizza
by washadjeffmad 11y ago
Whether or not they understand Bayes, some groups of people are more concerned about what their posteriors will become proportional to whether they choose pizza and/or froyo.
In those cases, despite your information being generally probabilistically correct for your goal, the worst decision could be giving them something that they'll eat (and enjoy) or want to eat but can't. You're predicting for what to bring on a first encounter, and the best answer could be to bring nothing until you have better information.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoIt's not always possible to gather better information - sometimes all we have is base rates. Furthermore, even when we do have other information, combining other information with base rates yields a superior result. If you don't agree, by all means write down a distribution and an objective function, and show me decision process that is better than the Bayes optimal decision rule. (Hint: you can't. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf Or for a simple example illustrating why, consider the first 20 slides of this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-science-conversion-hotel-2015 http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-sc... )