Evidence with uncertain likelihoods

Synthese 171 (1):111-133 (2009)
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Abstract

An agent often has a number of hypotheses, and must choose among them based on observations, or outcomes of experiments. Each of these observations can be viewed as providing evidence for or against various hypotheses. All the attempts to formalize this intuition up to now have assumed that associated with each hypothesis h there is a likelihood function  μ h , which is a probability measure that intuitively describes how likely each observation is, conditional on h being the correct hypothesis. We consider an extension of this framework where there is uncertainty as to which of a number of likelihood functions is appropriate, and discuss how one formal approach to defining evidence, which views evidence as a function from priors to posteriors, can be generalized to accommodate this uncertainty.

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Joseph Y. Halpern
Cornell University

Citations of this work

Probabilistic Logics and Probabilistic Networks.Rolf Haenni, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Gregory Wheeler & Jon Williamson - 2010 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Synthese Library. Edited by Gregory Wheeler, Rolf Haenni, Jan-Willem Romeijn & and Jon Williamson.

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