Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

Most grad-level Deep Learning classes have a week or so devoted to "Approximate Bayes" methods. And it's conceivable future updates to all popular probabilistic programming languages will include "programmable" rather than "fixed-function" inference methods.

"Inference Metaprogramming" paper

https://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/paper/pldi18.pdf

Latest state-of-the-art research will be presented at upcoming NeuroIPS conference

Symposium on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference

http://approximateinference.org/accepted/

I think the most fascinating aspect is that Friston and his team are working within the field of Computational and Algorithmic Psychiatry. I mean this pre-print is really interesting: using video game play to diagnose disorder.

Active Inference in OpenAI Gym: A Paradigm for Computational Investigations Into Psychiatric Illness

https://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S2451-9022(...

Since you mention Bayesian methods, I thought I may randomly ask you - have you come across any good work about applications of subjective Bayesian statistics in AI?

I was particularly interested in subjective Bayes theory due to the way it seems to interleave human input with mathematical theory.

I first learned about it from a non-fiction book in which these techniques were used by scientists in the US to locate Russian ICBMs that were test-fired during the Cold War and landed in the ocean. The wisdom of experts was quantified and fed into a simple Bayesian subjective probability calculation which lead to prioritization of target areas to investigate and the US located on either the first or second try - I can't recall. I've seen a few other interesting applications of this as well.

I'm not an expert in this area, but you sound like you might be - so I thought I'd take the change to ask :)

I'm not an expert either, but you might be interested in the book 'Superforecasting' by Tetlock and Gardner - they have done some (IMHO) very interesting research on predictions markets. It might be the kind of thing you're looking to research more of!

Thanks for the recommendation - that does look very interesting indeed! I will find myself a copy and have a read. Hacker News book club comes through again!! :)

> Since you mention Bayesian methods, I thought I may randomly ask you - have you come across any good work about applications of subjective Bayesian statistics in AI?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0MF-r9PsvE

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10756 (by my adviser)

https://probprog.cc/ (chaired by my adviser, new)

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