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Bayesian Statistics: The three cultures

(statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
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thegginthesky ◴[] No.41080693[source]
I miss the college days where professors would argue endlessly on Bayesian vs Frequentist.

The article is very well succinct and even explains why even my Bayesian professors had different approaches to research and analysis. I never knew about the third camp, Pragmatic Bayes, but definitely is in line with a professor's research that was very through on probability fit and the many iteration to get the prior and joint PDF just right.

Andrew Gelman has a very cool talk "Andrew Gelman - Bayes, statistics, and reproducibility (Rutgers, Foundations of Probability)", which I highly recommend for many Data Scientists

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RandomThoughts3 ◴[] No.41080979[source]
I’m always puzzled by this because while I come from a country where the frequentist approach generally dominates, the fight with Bayesian basically doesn’t exist. That’s just a bunch of mathematical theories and tools. Just use what’s useful.

I’m still convinced that Americans tend to dislike the frequentist view because it requires a stronger background in mathematics.

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gnulinux ◴[] No.41081982[source]
This statement is correct only on a very basic, fundamental sense, but it disregards the research practice. Let's say you're a mathematician who studies analysis or algebra. Sure, technically there is no fundamental reason for constructive logic and classical logic to "compete", you can simply choose whichever one is useful for the problem you're solving, in fact {constructive + lem + choice axioms} will be equivalent to classical math, so why not just study constructive math since it's higher level of abstraction and you can always add those axioms "later" when you have a particular application.

In reality, on a human level, it doesn't work like that because, when you have disagreements on the very foundations of your field, although both camps can agree that their results do follow, the fact that their results (and thus terminology) are incompatible makes it too difficult to research both at the same time. This basically means, practically speaking, you need to be familiar with both, but definitely specialize in one. Which creates hubs of different sorts of math/stats/cs departments etc.

If you're, for example, working on constructive analysis, you'll have to spend tremendous amount of energy on understanding contemporary techniques like localization etc just to work around a basic logical axiom, which is likely irrelevant to a lot of applications. Really, this is like trying to understand the mathematical properties of binary arithmetic (Z/2Z) but day-to-day studying group theory in general. Well, sure Z/2Z is a group, but really you're simply interested in a single, tiny, finite abelian group, but now you need to do a whole bunch of work on non-abelian groups, infinite groups, non-cyclic groups etc just to ignore all those facts.

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1. RandomThoughts3 ◴[] No.41083330[source]
I would follow but neither Bayesian nor frequentist probabilities are rocket science.

I’m not following your exemple about binary and group theory either. Nobody looks at the properties of binary and stops there. If you are interested in number theory, group theory will be a useful part of your toolbox for sure.