Unit completes catalogue of Jeffreys papers

Migration Studies Unit Working Papers No .

IJCH Successfully Completes Transition Year

A s 2012 draws to a close, I am delighted to report to our readers that IJCH has successfully transformed itself into an Open Access and completely online journal, joining the family of journals published by the capable hands of our colleagues in Co-Action. Without fixed publication dates, manuscripts are now published online as soon as they are copyedited and laid out, greatly reducing the tim...

Adaptive Sparseness Using Jeffreys Prior

In this paper we introduce a new sparseness inducing prior which does not involve any (hyper)parameters that need to be adjusted or estimated. Although other applications are possible, we focus here on supervised learning problems: regression and classification. Experiments with several publicly available benchmark data sets show that the proposed approach yields state-of-the-art performance. I...

Harold Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability revisited

Published nearly seventy years ago, Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability (1939) has had a unique impact on the Bayesian community and is now considered to be one of the main classics in Bayesian Statistics as well as the initiator of the objective Bayes school. In particular, its advances on the derivation of noninformative priors as well as on the scaling of Bayes factors have had a lasting impact ...

The Statistical Education of Harold Jeffreys

The paper considers the statistical work of the physicist Harold Jeffreys. In 1933–4 Jeffreys had a controversy with R.A. Fisher, the leading statistician of the time. Prior to the encounter, Jeffreys had worked on probability as the basis for scientific inference and had used methods from the theory of errors in astronomy and seismology. He had also started to rework the theory of errors on th...