Conspiracy theories cover topics from politicians to world events. Frequently, proponents of conspiracies hold these beliefs strongly despite available evidence that may challenge or disprove them. Therefore, conspiratorial reasoning has often been described as illegitimate or flawed. In the paper, we explore the possibility of growing a rational (Bayesian) conspiracy theorist through an Agent-...

In this note we give a precise formulation of “resistance to arbitrary side information” and show that several relaxations of differential privacy imply it. The formulation follows the ideas originally due to Dwork and McSherry, stated implicitly in [4]. This is, to our knowledge, the first place such a formulation appears explicitly. The proof that relaxed definitions (and hence the schemes of...

Using process capability indices to quantify manufacturing process precision (consistency) and performance, is an essential part of implementing any quality improvement program. Most research works for testing the capability indices have focused on using the traditional distribution frequency approaches. Cheng and Spiring [IIE Trans. 21 (1) 97] proposed a Bayesian procedure for assessing proces...

Berkleasmium sp. Dzf12, an endophytic fungus from Dioscorea zingiberensis, is a high producer of spirobisnaphthalenes with various bioactivities. The exopolysaccharide (EPS) produced by this fungus also shows excellent antioxidant activity. In this study, the experimental designs based on statistics were employed to evaluate and optimize the medium for EPS production in liquid culture of Berkle...

In the context of learning Bayesian networks from data, very little work has been published on methods for assessing the quality of an induced model. This issue, however, has received a great deal of attention in the statistics literature. In this paper, we take a well-known method from statistics, Efron’s Bootstrap, and examine its applicability for assessing a confidence measure on features o...

A pooling design can be used as a powerful strategy to compensate for limited amounts of samples or high biological variation. In this paper, we perform a comparative study to model and quantify the effects of virtual pooling on the performance of the widely applied classifiers, support vector machines (SVMs), random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), penalized logistic regression (PLR), ...

Scientists who use animals in research must justify the number of animals to be used, and committees that review proposals to use animals in research must review this justification to ensure the appropriateness of the number of animals to be used. This article discusses when the number of animals to be used can best be estimated from previous experience and when a simple power and sample size c...