Skip to content
Kudos AI

Tagged “inference”

6 articles.

4 min readStatistical Inference

The 95% Interval That Covers 81% of the Time

The textbook confidence interval for a proportion has exact coverage you can compute by summing over the n+1 possible samples, and at n = 30 with p = 0.10 it is 0.8085 rather than 0.95. Coverage does not improve monotonically with n, and in a rare-event setting it can fall to 0.0392. Two one-line alternatives fix it.

Statistics
3 min readProbabilistic Reasoning

A Hundred Thousand Samples, Four Hundred of Them Real

On the burglary network with both neighbours calling, rejection sampling keeps 183 of 100,000 draws and likelihood weighting keeps all of them at an effective sample size of 396. Both estimates are about 10% off a posterior of 0.284172, and the reason is exactly computable: 252 samples carry 76% of the weight and 99.975% of the squared weight.

Artificial IntelligenceProbability
10 min readStatistical Inference

What a Sample Can and Cannot Tell You

Estimators as random variables with distributions of their own, the case where the unbiased estimator is the worse one, what a confidence interval actually promises and the standard interval that delivers 87% where it advertises 95%, and what a p-value is a probability of - every figure computed exactly or by fixed-seed simulation.

StatisticsProbability
9 min readLogic and Knowledge

Logic and Knowledge Representation

Reasoning about what must be true: models and entailment worked by exhaustive enumeration, soundness and completeness, why propositional logic runs out of expressive power, and where first-order logic picks up.

Knowledge RepresentationArtificial Intelligence
6 min readProbability Foundations

Bayes' Theorem and Belief Updating

Derive Bayes' theorem from the definition of conditional probability, then work the base-rate example that fools almost everyone, twice: once with the formula and once by pure counting.

ProbabilityMathematicsArtificial Intelligence
7 min readStatistical Learning Foundations

What Is Statistical Learning?

The setup behind every predictive model: estimating an unknown function f from data, the split between reducible and irreducible error, and why prediction and inference pull in different directions.

StatisticsMachine LearningMathematics