On the definition of objective probabilities by empirical similarity

Itzhak Gilboa*, Offer Lieberman, David Schmeidler

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We suggest to define objective probabilities by similarity-weighted empirical frequencies, where more similar cases get a higher weight in the computation of frequencies. This formula is justified intuitively and axiomatically, but raises the question, which similarity function should be used? We propose to estimate the similarity function from the data, and thus obtain objective probabilities. We compare this definition to others, and attempt to delineate the scope of situations in which objective probabilities can be used.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)79-95
Number of pages17
JournalSynthese
Volume172
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2010

Keywords

  • Case-based reasoning
  • Frequentist approach
  • Objective probability
  • Similarity

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