Prior Elicitation, Assessment and Inference with a Dirichlet Prior

Methods are developed for eliciting a Dirichlet prior based upon stating bounds on the individual probabilities that hold with high prior probability. This approach to selecting a prior is applied to a contingency table problem where it is demonstrated how to assess the prior with respect to the bia...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Michael Evans, Irwin Guttman, Peiying Li
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2017-10-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/10/564
Description
Summary:Methods are developed for eliciting a Dirichlet prior based upon stating bounds on the individual probabilities that hold with high prior probability. This approach to selecting a prior is applied to a contingency table problem where it is demonstrated how to assess the prior with respect to the bias it induces as well as how to check for prior-data conflict. It is shown that the assessment of a hypothesis via relative belief can easily take into account what it means for the falsity of the hypothesis to correspond to a difference of practical importance and provide evidence in favor of a hypothesis.
ISSN:1099-4300