Talk:Bayesian regret

Status?
Can someone please explain the status of this page? How would I look up the past results of RfD on this page? Would it be possible to have a nice easy template so that all pages under this wikiproject had a record of their status on their talk page? Homunq (talk) 06:06, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * A template like that is a good idea, but I don't personally know how to make one. Hopefully someone will join the project that will know how to make templates like that. As for past results, I don't know about RfD, but there was a prior AfD here way back in 2006 for it. Other than that, I wasn't able to find anything. Silver  seren C 06:13, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Incomprehensible
What a completely incomprehensible article. Tom Ruen (talk) 09:46, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Not an accepted term in voting/social choice theory
The term "Bayesian Regret" was first used in the context of voting theory by Warren Smith in his unpublished 2000 article, "Range Voting". This was a misnomer; in the game theory literature prior to that, "Bayesian regret" meant "the (utilitiarian) regret for a Bayesian strategy", not "(utilitarian) regret that is Bayesian" as Smith seems to have meant.

Smith's article is not itself a reliable source, as it was never peer-reviewed. However, it was (in my personal opinion), a useful and groundbreaking work; and it has inspired many amateur voting theorists in the years since, many of whom use the term as Smith did. It would not surprise me if one of those uses has reached a venue which is borderline WP:RS.

For me, the concept is a valuable one, but the term is an obvious misnomer. "Bayesian" applies to a branch of statistics involving conditional distributions (that is, posteriors based on a prior and some event to be conditioned on); while the original game theory use of this term was Bayesian in this sense, Warren Smith's use of this term involved no conditioning at all, being solely an expected value. In more recent years, amateur voting theorists have begun using an alternate term ("Voter Satisfaction Efficiency") for the same concept.

I cannot provide reliable sources for all of the above info because much of it involves the amateur voting theory community of which I have been a part since before Smith's article. As an amateur community, much of our discussion is not in WP:RS venues. (Note, however, that I do have a degree in a field relating to the original, attested meaning of this term.)

I deleted the section of this article on voting theory, which was largely WP:OR. I also deleted the three references purportedly relating to this section, none of which include the word "Bayesian" at all. Homunq (࿓) 01:24, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


 * The (mis)use of this term in voting theory is documented in one WP:RS I know of: William Poundstone's book "Gaming the Vote". I added a brief section directing to the correct article on this, which currently has no references, but if references are needed, this is what I'd use. (I don't have the book handy, so I can't add the ref myself with page number.) Homunq (࿓) 20:11, 11 October 2020 (UTC)