Mechanical Turkeys: Mechanical Turkeys: G. Belot.

Some learning strategies that work well when computational considerations are abstracted away from become severely limiting when such considerations are taken into account. We illustrate this phenomenon for agents who attempt to extrapolate patterns in binary data streams chosen from among a countab...

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Published in:Journal of Philosophical Logic Vol. 54; no. 1; pp. 197 - 219
Main Author: Belot, Gordon
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Feb2025
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        au: Belot, Gordon
        affil: https://ror.org/00jmfr291 Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, 435 South State Street, 48104, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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        Big data
        Simplicity
      sug:
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          Big data
          Simplicity
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        Bayesian learning
        Computable Bayesianism
        Induction
        Learning by enumeration
      ab: Some learning strategies that work well when computational considerations are abstracted away from become severely limiting when such considerations are taken into account. We illustrate this phenomenon for agents who attempt to extrapolate patterns in binary data streams chosen from among a countable family of possibilities. If computational constraints are ignored, then two strategies that will always work are learning by enumeration (enumerate the possibilities—in order of simplicity, say—then search for the one earliest in the ordering that agrees with your data and use it to predict the next data point) and Bayesian learning. But there are many families of computable data streams that, although they can be successfully extrapolated by computable agents, cannot be handled by any computable learner by enumeration. And while there is a sense in which Bayesian learning is a fully general strategy for computable learners, the ability to mimic powerful learners comes at a price for Bayesians: they cannot, in general, become highly confident of their predictions in the limit of large data sets and they cannot, in general, use priors that incorporate all relevant background knowledge.
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    language: English
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