unsupervised learning, we cast Markov Chain Monte Carlo as a stochastic, hill-climbing policy search algorithm. Importantly, this algorithm’s search bias is directly tied to the prior and its MCMC proposal kernels, which means we can draw on the full Bayesian toolbox to express the search bias, including

unsupervised learning, we cast Markov Chain Monte Carlo as a stochastic, hill-climbing policy search algorithm. Importantly, this algorithm’s search bias is directly tied to the prior and its MCMC proposal kernels, which means we can draw on the full Bayesian toolbox to express the search bias, including

Although Bayesian analysis has been in use since Laplace, the Bayesian method of model--comparison has only recently been developed in depth. In this paper, the Bayesian approach to regularisation and model--comparison is demonstrated by studying the inference problem of interpolating noisy data

Recent work in supervised learning has shown that a surprisingly simple Bayesian classifier with strong assumptions of independence among features, called naive Bayes, is competitive with state-of-the-art classifiers such as C4.5. This fact raises the question of whether a classifier with less

This paper studies the flows of funds into and out of equity mutual funds. Consumers base their fund purchase decisions on prior performance information, but do so asymmetrically, investing disproportionately more in funds that performed very well the prior period. Search costs seem

The Ponder language provides a common means of specifying security policies that map onto various access control implementation mechanisms for firewalls, operating systems, databases and Java. It supports obligation policies that are event triggered conditionaction rules for policy based management

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Andrew Warner for generously sharing their data with us. We are particularly grateful to Ben-David, Frankel, Romer, Sachs, Warner and Romain Wacziarg for helpful e-mail exchanges. We have benefited greatly from discussions in seminars at the University of California at Berkeley,

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Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences