Words of Probability
..... / memo.mlp (mlp) 10.12.20 08:41:34
Research Memorandum No.1129
December 3, 2010
Words of Probability
ISHIGURO, Makio(The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)
Words of Probability
ISHIGURO, Makio(The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)
Key Words: subjective probability, confidence, belief, frequency, verbal expression
Abstract
There are everyday expressions such that ’probably’; ’might be’;’could be’ etc., to describe the strengths of one’s confidence in the occurrence of events in the future. On the other hand there are probability theory expressions such that ”the probability of the occurrence of event E is 0.1”. The situation is almost the same with the color names. There are everyday expressions such that ’blue’; ’red’;’yellow’ etc., to describe the colors of objects in the sight. On the other hand there are scientific expressions such that ”the wavelength of the light in sight is 620 nm”. There will be no consensus about the pinpoint assignment of probability values to the everyday expressions of the strength of the confidence. But there might be some stable distributions of those assignment by common people. I conducted a small scale opinion poll mainly among my friends. The purpose of this memorandum is to summarize contributed answers and record some of my thought on the subject.
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HTML version of this article is accessible. ( http://www.ism.ac.jp/ ishiguro/Pofiss/pfs.@090311.@025203.labo/verbal/memo.g1frm.html ) You need MatEx-2D display ActiveX, which is easily installed using installer ( http://ftp.ism.ac.jp:8000/ISMLIB/matex/MatEx2D-v*-*-Pkg.exe ) on your windows PC.
Contents
1 Introduction 2 Data 3 Aggregation of Data 3.1 Blurring . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 A few more examples . . . . . . 3.3 Boxplot representation . . . . . 3.4 Bayesian Posterior Distribution 3 3 4 4 6 7 7 10 10 11 13 13
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Research Memorandum No.1129
December 3, 2010
Words of Probability
ISHIGURO, Makio(The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)
Words of Probability
ISHIGURO, Makio(The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)
Key Words: subjective probability, confidence, belief, frequency, verbal expression
Abstract
There are everyday expressions such that ’probably’; ’might be’;’could be’ etc., to describe the strengths of one’s confidence in the occurrence of events in the future. On the other hand there are probability theory expressions such that ”the probability of the occurrence of event E is 0.1”. The situation is almost the same with the color names. There are everyday expressions such that ’blue’; ’red’;’yellow’ etc., to describe the colors of objects in the sight. On the other hand there are scientific expressions such that ”the wavelength of the light in sight is 620 nm”. There will be no consensus about the pinpoint assignment of probability values to the everyday expressions of the strength of the confidence. But there might be some stable distributions of those assignment by common people. I conducted a small scale opinion poll mainly among my friends. The purpose of this memorandum is to summarize contributed answers and record some of my thought on the subject.
1
HTML version of this article is accessible. ( http://www.ism.ac.jp/ ishiguro/Pofiss/pfs.@090311.@025203.labo/verbal/memo.g1frm.html ) You need MatEx-2D display ActiveX, which is easily installed using installer ( http://ftp.ism.ac.jp:8000/ISMLIB/matex/MatEx2D-v*-*-Pkg.exe ) on your windows PC.
Contents
1 Introduction 2 Data 3 Aggregation of Data 3.1 Blurring . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 A few more examples . . . . . . 3.3 Boxplot representation . . . . . 3.4 Bayesian Posterior Distribution 3 3 4 4 6 7 7 10 10 11 13 13
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References: • Grou, Robert (2010). Subjective probabilities..,Personal communication. 13 • Wikipedia (2010.10.17). Words of Estimative Probability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words of Estimative Probability • data.csv • summary-0.05.xls • Ishiguro,M. and Saito, M. (2004). MatEx-2D, the 2-dim. Language for Mathematical Expression , ISM Statistical Computing Technical Report, RSC-032 14