Why Beta Priors: Invariance-Based Explanation

Authors

Olga Kosheleva, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul, Maejo UniversityFollow

Publication Date

7-2019

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-19-74

Abstract

In the Bayesian approach, to describe a prior distribution on the set [0,1] of all possible probability values, typically, a Beta distribution is used. The fact that there have been many successful applications of this idea seems to indicate that there must be a fundamental reason for selecting this particular family of distributions. In this paper, we show that the selection of this family can indeed be explained if we make reasonable invariance requirements.