Rebecca Bernstein (UCSC) spoke about globular cluster chemical abundances. Scott Tremaine (IAS) spoke about exoplanet orbit inclinations. It was a great day. Tremaine also challenged me on some Bayesianisms—as he is wont to do—and I told him about my new view that really you should be publishing your likelihood function not your posterior PDF. And I mean the function, not the maximum-likelihood point and some interval around it.
That's sensible. Then someone else with a different prior can straightforwardly compute her own posterior PDF. Although, it doesn't hurt to publish both... Thinking about a sensible prior can be a useful bit of work for an author to do.
ReplyDeleteCf discussion here: http://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/does-coverage-matter/
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