My favorite:
Neural nets. Let’s call them what they are.
(Not so) New name: Nonlinear regression.

Normal Deviate

Statisticians and Computer Scientists have done a pretty poor job of thinking of names for procedures. Names are important. No one is going to use a method called “the Stalin-Mussolini Matrix Completion Algorithm.” But who would pass up the opportunity to use the “Schwarzenegger-Shatner Statistic.” So, I have decided to offer some suggestions for re-naming some of our procedures. I am open to further suggestions.

Bayesian Inference. Bayes did use his famous theorem to do a calculation. But it was really Laplace who systematically used Bayes’ theorem for inference.
New Name: Laplacian Inference.

Bayesian Nets. A Bayes nets is just a directed acyclic graph endowed with probability distribution. This has nothing to do with Bayesian — oops, I mean Laplacian — inference. According to Wikipedia, it was Judea Pearl who came up with the name.
New Name: Pearl Graph.

The Bayes Classification Rule. Give $latex {(X,Y)}&fg=000000$, with $latex…

View original post 567 more words

Posted on December 19, 2012, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: