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- Natural parameterization of ignorance is
constant.
- But suppose we put and then has a
priori probability
- So the concept of ``complete ignorance'' is not well defined, as
change of variables changes concept.
- Jeffreys (a big bad English-Oxford University Press
book cited in Mathews and Walker) spends 100's of pages trying to avoid
this difficulty.
- His efforts are, in my opinion, so much garbage.
- Fortunately, there is no trouble for large n because of both an
obvious numerical reason (see next slide (The Likelihood Maximizes) and
a not so obvious mathematical reason (see slide (General Maximum
Likelihood Methods)).
Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu