Teaching Decision Theory Proof Strategies Using a Crowdsourcing Problem

DOI10.1080/00031305.2016.1264316MaRDI QIDQ6039629zbMATH OpenWikidataFDO

Authors Luís Gustavo Esteves, Rafael Izbicki, Rafael B. Stern

Publication date 23 May 2023

Published in The American Statistician (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.07670

zbMATH Keywords

Bayes decisioncrowdsourcing problemminimax decision

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistics (62-XX)

Abstract: Teaching how to derive minimax decision rules can be challenging because of the lack of examples that are simple enough to be used in the classroom. Motivated by this challenge, we provide a new example that illustrates the use of standard techniques in the derivation of optimal decision rules under the Bayes and minimax approaches. We discuss how to predict the value of an unknown quantity, $heta!in!0,1$, given the opinions of $n$ experts. An important example of such crowdsourcing problem occurs in modern cosmology, where $heta$ indicates whether a given galaxy is merging or not, and $Y_1,ldots,Y_n$ are the opinions from $n$ astronomers regarding $heta$. We use the obtained prediction rules to discuss advantages and disadvantages of the Bayes and minimax approaches to decision theory. The material presented here is intended to be taught to first-year graduate students.

Cites work

• All of Nonparametric Statistics
• Decision Theory
• Learning with many experts: model selection and sparsity

Cited in

(2)

• A comparison of two methods for obtaining a collective posterior distribution
• Quantification under prior probability shift: the ratio estimator and its extensions

This page was built for publication: Teaching Decision Theory Proof Strategies Using a Crowdsourcing Problem

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6039629)