The Society for Imprecise Probabilities: Theories and Applications
Blog
The SIPTA blog started out in 2011 as a separate WordPress website and was integrated into the SIPTA website in 2021. Everyone in the SIPTA Community can contribute!
Interested in writing a blogpost for the imprecise probabilities community yourself?
Then get in touch with our blog editors at blog@sipta.org.
Examples of possible contributions are reports on meetings, reviews of books or recent literature, interviews, software presentations, etcetera.
Posted on December 19, 2024
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Theses by Giacomo Molinari (edited by Arthur Van Camp)
On October 21st, 2024, I defended my PhD thesis: “Deference principles for Imprecise Probabilities”.
I worked on this thesis over the last four years, under the supervision of Jason Konek and Catrin Campbell–Moore.
My research was part of the ERC-funded project “Epistemic Utility for Imprecise Probability” hosted by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol.
This meant I had the fortune to work alongside Arthur Van Camp and Kevin Blackwell, who were postdocs on the project.
I also benefited greatly from a research visit at MIT, hosted by Kevin Dorst.
My PhD examiners were Jim Joyce and Richard Pettigrew.
Posted on August 22, 2024
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Event Reports by Adrián Detavernier
The eleventh SIPTA School on Imprecise Probabilities took place from Monday 12 to Friday 16 August 2024 in the beautiful city of Ghent.
The goal of this week was to bring interested researchers together and introduce them to the world of imprecise probabilities.
The organisers, Alexander Erreygers and Floris Persiau, from the research group “Foundations Lab for imprecise probabilities” at Ghent University, did a wonderful job at achieving that goal.
They succeeded at organising a school at which not only everything went by very smoothly, but they also succeeded in bringing a diverse group of people together from across the world (the Netherlands, Spain, US, UK, …).
The presence of the wide variety of profiles - PhD students, master students, researchers from the private sector, experienced lecturers/professors - made the SIPTA school even more interesting.
Posted on April 11, 2024
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Interviews by Michele Caprio
A few weeks ago, Michele had a conversation with Eyke Hüllermeier about his exceptional career, the status of the field of Imprecise Probabilistic Machine Learning, and more.
Please enjoy the interview below.
Posted on February 28, 2024
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Theses by Arianna Casanova Flores (edited by H. Diego Estrada-Lugo & Alexander Erreygers)
In July 2023, I successfully defended my PhD thesis entitled “Rationality and desirability - A foundational study”.
This work reflects five years of research at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence USI-SUPSI (IDSIA) in Lugano, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Zaffalon and Prof. Luca Maria Gambardella.
Alongside Prof. Zaffalon and Prof. Gambardella, my committee included Prof. Fabio Crestani, Prof. Ernst C. Wit, Prof. Matthias C.M. Troffaes and Dr. Nic Wilson.
Posted on April 11, 2023
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Theses by Dominik Hose (edited by Henna Bains)
On May 20th in 2022, I successfully defended my PhD thesis [1] entitled “Possibilistic Reasoning with Imprecise Probabilities: Statistical Inference and Dynamic Filtering”. This dissertation is the result of five wonderful years at the Institute of Engineering and Computational Mechanics at the University of Stuttgart under the enthusiastic supervision of my “Doktorvater” Michael Hanss. Apart from him, my committee was also composed of Scott Ferson and Ryan Martin—but we will get to that.
Posted on September 12, 2022
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Theses by Tathagata Basu (edited by Henna Bains)
After three years of research and extensive brainstorming with my supervisors; Jochen Einbeck and Matthias Troffaes, I finally defended my thesis on 15th December 2020. The thesis, entitled “High dimensional statistical modelling under limited information” was examined by Dr Hailiang Du and Dr Erik Quaghebeur in the presence of Dr Ostap Hryniv.
Posted on July 7, 2022
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Interviews by Henna Bains
This blog is the first instalment in a new blog series where we interview members of the SIPTA community.
A few weeks ago, Henna had a conversation with Sébastien Destercke about his career so far, thoughts on imprecise probabilities, and more. Please enjoy the interview below.
Posted on April 26, 2022
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Topic Overviews by Alessio Benavoli (edited by Ignacio Montes)
I was glad when Ignacio Montes, SIPTA’s Executive Editor at the time, invited me to write a post on my research journey on Quantum Mechanics (QM), a journey undertaken together with Alessandro Facchini and Marco Zaffalon. Everything started with an article by Hans Christian von Baeyer, titled Quantum Weirdness? It’s All in Your Mind, published in Scientific American 2013. The article is about Quantum Bayesianism (QBism), a model of QM in which the wave function exists only as a mathematical tool employed by an agent to assign his or her personal belief that a quantum system will have a particular property.
Posted on June 6, 2021
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Books by Ryan Martin (edited by Ignacio Montes)
The book Inferential Models develops a new framework for statistical inference, one that assumes no prior, but returns (something like) a posterior probability distribution that can be used for drawing inferences. Moreover, that probability-like output satisfies a strong calibration property, called validity, which, among other things, implies that procedures derived from it provably control frequentist error rates. How is this related to imprecise probability? Indeed, this is not a book about imprecise probability, but it turns out that the inferential model’s probability-like output must be imprecise in order to achieve the validity property. Therefore, random sets, belief/plausibility functions, etc., play an important role in the development of this theory of statistical inference.
Posted on March 24, 2021
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Topic Overviews by Dennis Mauá and Fabio Cozman (edited by Ignacio Montes)
Credal networks combine the intuitive expressivity of graphs and the principled treatment and flexibility of imprecise probability to deliver a powerful framework for uncertainty management. Here, we briefly motivate the use of credal networks, provide a historical account of their development and present a commented bibliography on existing surveys and tutorials on the topic.
Posted on March 9, 2016
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Theses by Jasper De Bock
On 13 May 2015, after four years of intensive research under the enthousiastic supervision of Gert de Cooman, I succesfully defended my PhD Thesis, entitled “Credal Networks under Epistemic Irrelevance: Theory and Algorithms”. The jury was composed of Fabio Cozman, Enrique Miranda, Serafín Moral, Joris Walraevens, Dirk Aeyels, Dries Benoit, Jan Van Campenhout and Rik Van de Walle. My dissertation presents a detailed study of credal networks under epistemic irrelevance, which are probabilistic graphical models that can compactly and intuitively represent the uncertainty that is associated with the key variables in some domain, and which can then be used to answer various domain-specific queries (compute inferences) that are of interest to the user. They share many of the nice features of Pearl’s celebrated Bayesian networks, but have the added advantage that they can represent uncertainty in a more flexible and realistic way.
Posted on November 6, 2015
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Event Reports by Christoph Jansen and Julia Plass
The 8th Workshop on Principles and Methods of Statistical Inference with Interval Probability, organized by the working group “Foundations of Statistics and Their Applications” of the Department of Statistics and the “Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP)” of the Department of Philosophy from the LMU Munich took place from the 1st to the 6th of September 2015 (actually we ended at the 5th, because unfortunately our excursion was cancelled because of bad weather forecast…).
Posted on November 2, 2015
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Event Reports by Serena Doria
The 9th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications was held from Monday 20 to Friday 24 July 2015 in the Italian city of Pescara. This conference was a result of the productive cooperation among the members of the Steering Committee, formed by Thomas Augustin, Gert de Cooman, Enrique Miranda, Erik Quaeghebeur, Teddy Seidenfeld, and myself. I wish to thank the members of the Local Organizing Committee, Attilio Grilli, Mariangela Scorrano and Andrea Di Cencio for their valuable help and the Department of Engineering and Geology of the University G. d’Annunzio for its financial support.
Posted on January 5, 2015
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Event Reports by Enrique Miranda
The sixth SIPTA school on imprecise probabilities was held in the beautiful city of Montpellier (France), on July 21-25, 2014.The school was composed of twenty five participants, from no less than ten different coutnries. It was organized by Kevin Loquin from LIRMM in Montpellier, with the collaboration of Olivier Strauss, Erik Quaeghebeur and Enrique Miranda.
The school was held in the beautiful botanic institute, built in the end of the nineteenth century, situated just next to the oldest french botanic garden.
Posted on November 11, 2014
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Books by Inés Couso
Random sets and random fuzzy sets as ill-perceived random variables. An introduction for PhD students and practitioners, by Inés Couso, Didier Dubois and Luciano Sánchez. Springer Briefs in Applied Sciences and Technology, subcategories: Springer Briefs in Computational Intelligence. 2014.
The notion of random set has been around for about 50 years, and has been considered rather independently by two sets of prominent authors. There are the works published in the mid-sixties by well-known economists like Aumann and Debreu on the integration of set-valued functions, followed by a full-fledged mathematical development by Kendall and Matheron. Completely apart from this trend is the pioneering work of Dempster who studied upper and lower probabilities induced by a multivalued mapping from a probability space to the range of an attribute of interest. On this basis, Shafer theory of evidence was built. Formally this is an avatar of random set theory.
Posted on October 27, 2014
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Event Reports by Arthur Van Camp and Stavros Lopatatzidis
The 7th edition of the Workshop on Principles and Methods of Statistical Inference with Interval Probability (abbreviated as WPMSIIP in the most pronounceable way), organised by the SYSTeMS Research group of Ghent University, took place in Ghent from 8 until 12 September 2014.
Posted on July 30, 2014
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Event Reports by Seamus Bradley
A workshop on Imprecise Probabilities in Statistics and Philosophy took place at LMU Munich on the 27th and 28th of June. The workshop was co-organised by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy and the LMU statistics department. There were speakers from four continents, and a broad range of views in philosophy and statistics were represented. The conference was a great success and we hope that this leads to closer ties between the philosophy and statistics communities.
Posted on July 17, 2014
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Books by Matthias C. M. Troffaes
Recently, two books have been published on imprecise probability theory. Lower Previsions: a monograph on said subject by myself and Gert de Cooman. Introduction to Imprecise Probabilities: a collection of contributed chapters on a wide range of topics, edited by Thomas Augustin, Frank Coolen, Gert de Cooman, and myself, with contributions from Joaquín Abellán, Alessandro Antonucci, Cassio P. de Campos, Giorgio Corani, Sébastien Destercke, Didier Dubois, Robert Hable, Filip Hermans, Nathan Huntley, Andrés Masegosa, Enrique Miranda, Serafín Moral, Michael Oberguggenberger, Erik Quaeghebeur, Glenn Shafer, Damjan Skulj, Michael Smithson, Lev Utkin, Gero Walter, Vladimir Vovk, Paolo Vicig, and Marco Zaffalon.
Posted on June 24, 2014
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Theses by Ignacio Montes
This thesis, supervised by Enrique Miranda and Susana Montes, was defended on May 16th. The jury was composed of Susana Díaz, Serafín Moral and Bernard De Baets. This thesis deals with the problem of comparing alternatives defined under some lack of information, that is considered to be either uncertainty, imprecision or both together.
Posted on April 24, 2014
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Theses by Andrea Wiencierz
My PhD thesis deals with the statistical problem of analyzing the relationship between a response variable and one or more explanatory variables when these quantities are only imprecisely observed. Regression methods are some of the most popular and commonly employed methods of statistical data analysis. Like most statistical tools, regression methods are usually based on the assumption that the analyzed data are precise and correct observations of the variables of interest. In statistical practice, however, often only incomplete or uncertain information about the data values is available.
Posted on April 14, 2014
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Software by Matthias C.M. Troffaes
Improb started in 2008 as a fairly small library for solving simple toy examples involving natural extension. The idea was to support exact rational calculations for lower previsions, by means of Komei Fukuda’s linear programming package cddlib. The very first incarnation of the library simply supported calculating the (unconditional) natural extension from any finite collection of assessments, and checking for avoiding sure loss and coherence. For about two years, not much happened with the code, until 2010.
Posted on February 6, 2014
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Software by Giorgio Corani
A classifier is a statistical model of the relationship between the attributes (features) of an object and its category (class).
Classifiers are learned from a training set and later are used on the test set to predict the class of a new object given its features.
Credal classifiers extend traditional classifiers allowing for set-valued (or indeterminate) predictions of classes.
The output set is typically larger when the data set is small or it contains many missing values.
Credal classifiers aim at producing reliable classifications also in conditions of poor information.
I am aware of only two software suitable for credal classification.
Posted on January 9, 2014
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Theses by Dennis D. Mauá
My PhD thesis is about connecting three hard computational problems that arise in tasks involving graph-based probabilistic reasoning, namely, the problems of maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference in Bayesian networks, planning with influence diagrams, and belief updating in credal networks under strong independence (or simply strong credal networks). Roughly speaking, in the MAP inference problem we seek the most probable explanation of a complex phenomena represented as a Bayesian network, a graph-based description of a multivariate joint probability distribution where nodes are identified with random variables and local conditional probability distributions.
Posted on January 7, 2014
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Event Reports by Alessandro Antonucci
The sixth edition of WPMSIIP, the Workshop on Principles and Methods of Statistical Inference with Interval Probability was held in Lugano (Switzerland) between the first and the second week of September 2013. The workshop was a follow-up to previous editions, held in Durham (2008, 2010), Munich (2009, 2012), and Lublijana (2011).
Posted on September 24, 2013
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Event Reports by Sebastien Destercke
The Eighth International Symposium on Imprecise Probabilities: Theories and Applications (ISIPTA ‘13) took place in the nice city of Compiègne, from July 2nd to July 5th.
We have to thank Fabio Cozman, Thierry Denoeux, Teddy Seidenfeld (and myself) for the scientific organization, and Cédric Baudrit, Véronique Berger-Cherfaoui, Thierry Denoeux, Mylène Masson, Benjamin Quost, Mohamed Sallak (and myself) for the local organization.
With the participants, they all contributed to make of this ISIPTA a very interesting and friendly meeting.
Posted on May 17, 2013
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Other by Erik Quaeghebeur
Dear colleagues,
On Wednesday 15 May, I participated in the meeting ‘Open access versus Commercial Publishing’ organized by the maths and computer science section of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences.
The speakers consisted of two clear proponents of Open Access, an Elsevier Senior VP presenting her Company’s efforts in the Open Access area, and somebody giving a more descriptive overview of the issues at hand.
I found the meeting very interesting and I think the topic is relevant to all researchers.
I also feel that SIPTA, as a learned society, and its members, as authors, reviewers, and editors, have a role to play.
During one week, recent research in the field of Imprecise Probability Theory and the potential of imprecise methods to improve statistical analysis was vividly discussed by the workshop’s participants, who included international guests from the UK, France, Russia, Iran, Slovenia, Canada, and Switzerland. An updated programme is available on the workshop’s website.
Posted on October 3, 2011
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Event Reports by Enrique Miranda
The 7th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and
Applications was held in the beautiful city of Innsbruck (Austria), on July
25—28, 2011. It was organized by Frank Coolen, Gert de Cooman, Thomas Fetz and
Michael Oberguggenberger, with the help in the local organization of Anna
Bombasaro, Bernhard Schmelzer and Reinhard Stix.
A total of 40 papers dealing with theoretical and practical aspects of imprecise probabilities were presented, both with a poster and with a short talk.
On May 20th in 2022, I successfully defended my PhD thesis [1] entitled “Possibilistic Reasoning with Imprecise Probabilities: Statistical Inference and Dynamic Filtering”. This dissertation is the result of five wonderful years at the Institute of Engineering and Computational Mechanics at the University of Stuttgart under the enthusiastic supervision of my “Doktorvater” Michael Hanss. Apart from him, my committee was also composed of Scott Ferson and Ryan Martin—but we will get to that.
