Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bayesian regret


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was delete as original research. Verifiability is not established. The references that are substantiated are a non peer-reviewed publication by Warren Smith, a NY Times reference and a technical report from UNC; this is insufficient for a statistical term to be considered verifiable. -- Samir  धर्म 05:48, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Bayesian regret
Delete. Original research. Yellowbeard 15:21, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete as per WP:OR ST47 15:38, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Interestingly, in addition to this and this, which admittedly both have Smith as their origin, it turns out that there are other things known as Bayesian regret. Uncle G 15:57, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Weak keep, unless someone more expert in the field suggests a place to merge it. This seems legit. - Smerdis of Tlön 17:21, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete reluctantly. Seems perfectly legit but not sufficiently widely used yet to avoid the OR tag.    Dl yo ns 493   Ta lk  20:16, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete. The author has to reference sources besides himself. It's not in Bayesian inference. The author says it is a term from Voting system theory but it is not mentioned there. Nor in Social welfare function    (social utility) he links to in his article. The New York Times article is playing around with names of theorums -- not "terms" as this article's creater says. And if he is talking about a theorum with a history, then why isn't the history described? Besides, what he has written in this article isn't different from a vague description of Bayesian statistics in general.  GBYork 21:55, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The author says it is a term from Voting system theory but it is not mentioned there. &mdash; See the two pages that I linked to above. Uncle G 08:21, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep (and probably merge). This definition (from Uncle G) is quite general, and unconnected with Smith. Septentrionalis 18:24, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep I'm the author of the article, in no way connected with Smith (as I mentioned on the talk page when I created it, please read the talk page before you accuse me of WP:AUTO.). I am also not an advocate of range voting. I read Smith's article and found it notable. Nobody could call me Smith's sock-puppet, given that I edit from Guatemala and have contributed to WP:MESO. --Homunq 13:17, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Just included the references above in the article. I know that I didn't use a very standard reference format but I'm not sure what to use. As the article stands, it may not meet the standard of notable (though I think yes) but it is clearly not OR. --Homunq 13:58, 23 August 2006 (UTC)*


 * Keep This is the famous Warren Smith, whose name seems so bandied about herein without anybody consulting me about it of course. I think this article is more or less right, probably will get better, and is a useful and widely known concept in the statistics and voting methods worlds.  In addition to me using BR in 3 papers on comparing voting methods, the term has been used in, e.g.

Title: The sample complexity of exploration in the multi-armed bandit problem Author(s): Mannor S, Tsitsiklis JN Source: JOURNAL OF MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH 5: 623-648 JUN 2004

Title: The sample complexity of exploration in the multi-armed bandit problem Author(s): Mannor S, Tsitsiklis JN Source: JOURNAL OF MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH 5: 623-648 JUN 2004

Title: Asymptotic global robustness in Bayesian decision theory Author(s): Abraham C, Cadre B Source: ANNALS OF STATISTICS 32 (4): 1341-1366 AUG 2004

Title: Worst-case bounds for the logarithmic loss of predictors Author(s): Cesa-Bianchi N, Lugosi G Source: MACHINE LEARNING 43 (3): 247-264 JUN 2001

Title: ONE-ARMED BANDIT PROBLEMS WITH COVARIATES Author(s): SARKAR J Source: ANNALS OF STATISTICS 19 (4): 1978-2002 DEC 1991

Title: A BAYESIAN-APPROACH TO DECISION-MAKING UNDER AMBIGUITY Author(s): DOBBS IM Source: ECONOMICA 58 (232): 417-44

Title: The “lob-pass” problem and an on-line learning model of rational choice ... Authors: Joe Kilian, Kevin J. Lang , Barak A. Pearlmutter, ... Source: COLT 93

Of course it could be that this list of 7 published papers dating back 15 years found in seconds by a search on the keywords "Bayesian regret" (several authors explicitly having included that in their keywords lists), is not sufficient evidence that the term is widely used. Perhaps it is necessary to provide an explicit list of 100 papers for that purpose. Since your standards are so incredibly high.

The idea probably dates back to Bayes himself, though I have not checked. It is quite amazing to me how self-appointed experts at wikipedia simply proclaim, without ever checking or citing a damned thing and without ever giving any specific argument whatever, that terms are "widely used" or not, or that articles are "original research" or whatever. User:WarrenDSmith 25 August 2006 (UTC)WarrenDSmith 21:39, 25 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Delete Zero hits on JSTOR, zero hits on ScienceDirect, zero hits in the Journal of Games and Economic Behavior, the term "Bayesian regret" appears exactly zero times in the cited papers by Bordley (1983), Merrill (1984) and Dobbs (1991). Seems like User:WarrenDSmith did a search on "Bayesian" and "regret" separately. I can't find any evidence that it has been established as a standing term in the scientific literature. As such, WP:NOR. ~ trialsanderrors 01:58, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete. Although I can't supply additional reasoning, I can confirm this is not mainstream statistics.  &mdash; Arthur Rubin |  (talk) 07:28, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

This is homunq, the article author, again. It is true that the references Smith gives are based on the separate (but clearly related) use of the two terms. (Also, he has no reason to complain about not being contacted, as I contacted him.) But Uncle G's references, now mentioned in the article, use them together.

My own position is that the single original Smith article, while clearly biased in its presentation, is a solid advancement of the field, and notable in its own right. All the other references, put together, only at best use the two terms together in a way that is more-or-less clear from their meaning separately, as such the joint term would barely merit a definition, let alone an encyclopedia entry. Yet the term's use as a voting-system criterion which, unlike other criteria in use, occupies an important position in between objective mathematical criteria and ill-defined subjective ones, in my opinion deserves a short entry. Nobody is claiming the article isn't NPOV or that it lacks references. I suspect that in a contentious field like this one the above-normal vigilance about NPOV may be coloring this argument unjustifiably. --Homunq 17:23, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I assume you are talking about the Smith pdf listed in the references. Since fwict it isn't even published yet, we can't even assess its impact via citation search. It is simply not our our job to assess the importance of a scientific contribution ourselves, that clearly falls under WP:NOR. It is our job to verify whether the contribution had an impact via outside sources. And since no one in the scientific community has picked up on Smith's definition we can't either. ~ trialsanderrors 20:35, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.