The study shows how probability weighting can lead to betting in a risk-averse economy.
arXiv research
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It is a common belief that the behavior of shareholders depends upon the direction of price fluctuations: if prices increase they buy, if prices decrease they sell. That belief, however, is more based on ``common sense'' than on facts. In this paper we present evidence for a specific class of shareholders which shows t…
We explore a model of the interaction between banks and outside investors in which the ability of banks to issue inside money (short-term liabilities believed to be convertible into currency at par) can generate a collapse in asset prices and widespread bank insolvency. The banks and investors share a common belief abo…
We introduce a formal language IE that is a variant of the language PAL developed in [van Benthem 2011] by adding a belief operator and a common belief operator,specializing to stochastic analysis. A constant symbol in the language denotes a stochastic process so that we can represent several financial events as formul…
When banks choose similar investment strategies the financial system becomes vulnerable to common shocks. We model a simple financial system in which banks decide about their investment strategy based on a private belief about the state of the world and a social belief formed from observing the actions of peers. Observ…
GEnBP combines EnKF and GaBP for efficient high-dimensional inference.
Gathering the most information by picking the least amount of data is a common task in experimental design or when exploring an unknown environment in reinforcement learning and robotics. A widely used measure for quantifying the information contained in some distribution of interest is its entropy. Greedily minimizing…
πBO augments BO with user beliefs for better hyperparameter optimization.
Unified approach for learning with weak labels across various tasks.
New method for finding function correspondences in binary programs.
Diversification increases systemic risk, contrary to belief.
Gaussian belief propagation (BP) has been widely used for distributed inference in large-scale networks such as the smart grid, sensor networks, and social networks, where local measurements/observations are scattered over a wide geographical area. One particular case is when two neighboring agents share a common obser…
It is known that fixed points of loopy belief propagation (BP) correspond to stationary points of the Bethe variational problem, where we minimize the Bethe free energy subject to normalization and marginalization constraints. Unfortunately, this does not entirely explain BP because BP is a dual rather than primal algo…
LLMs show potential for predicting financial returns, contrary to common belief.
In evaluating prediction markets (and other crowd-prediction mechanisms), investigators have repeatedly observed a so-called "wisdom of crowds" effect, which roughly says that the average of participants performs much better than the average participant. The market price---an average or at least aggregate of traders' b…
Paper compares hard and soft EM for BN learning from incomplete data.
Fast covariance calculation is required both for SLAM (e.g.~in order to solve data association) and for evaluating the information-theoretic term for different candidate actions in belief space planning (BSP). In this paper we make two primary contributions. First, we develop a novel general-purpose incremental covaria…
Imbalanced data with a skewed class distribution are common in many real-world applications. Deep Belief Network (DBN) is a machine learning technique that is effective in classification tasks. However, conventional DBN does not work well for imbalanced data classification because it assumes equal costs for each class.…
Learning rate decay (lrDecay) is a \emph{de facto} technique for training modern neural networks. It starts with a large learning rate and then decays it multiple times. It is empirically observed to help both optimization and generalization. Common beliefs in how lrDecay works come from the optimization analysis of (S…
Although optimization is the longstanding algorithmic backbone of machine learning, new models still require the time-consuming implementation of new solvers. As a result, there are thousands of implementations of optimization algorithms for machine learning problems. A natural question is, if it is always necessary to…
Unified Bayesian model explains in-context learning and activation steering in LLMs.
The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the calculations. However, we usually have only testimonies for the common events. While this…
Study shows gradient variance increases during deep learning training, contrary to common belief.
Financial economic models often assume that investors know (or agree on) the fundamental value of the shares of the firm, easing the passage from the individual to the collective dimension of the financial system generated by the Share Exchange over time. Our model relaxes that heroic assumption of one unique "true val…
Generalized belief propagation converges to optimal solutions on graphs with motifs.
Study risk sharing with Lambda VaR under diverse beliefs.
Study on optimal bubble riding with price-dependent entry times in a mean field game model.
Belief propagation recovers backpropagation results.
New framework analyzes belief evolution in social networks.
We consider the problem of imitation learning from expert demonstrations in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Belief representations, which characterize the distribution over the latent states in a POMDP, have been modeled using recurrent neural networks and probabilistic latent variable models, …
Wide deep neural networks are easy to optimize without constraints.
A common belief in model-free reinforcement learning is that methods based on random search in the parameter space of policies exhibit significantly worse sample complexity than those that explore the space of actions. We dispel such beliefs by introducing a random search method for training static, linear policies for…
This paper is intended to explain, in simple terms, some of the mechanisms and agents common to multiagent financial market simulations. We first discuss the necessity to include an exogenous price time series ("the fundamental value") for each asset and three methods for generating that series. We then illustrate one …
Improved error correction using neural networks and belief propagation.
NBF combines deep learning with classical filtering for better belief tracking.
This thesis investigates belief propagation's performance in graphical models with loops.
Oft-cited causes of mini-flash crashes include human errors, endogenous feedback loops, the nature of modern liquidity provision, fundamental value shocks, and market fragmentation. We develop a mathematical model which captures aspects of the first three explanations. Empirical features of recent mini-flash crashes ar…
FORBES learns flexible belief states for POMDPs using normalizing flows.
This work explores a social learning problem with agents having nonidentical noise variances and mismatched beliefs. We consider an -agent binary hypothesis test in which each agent sequentially makes a decision based not only on a private observation, but also on preceding agents' decisions. In addition, the agents…
Belief Propagation algorithms are instruments used broadly to solve graphical model optimization and statistical inference problems. In the general case of a loopy Graphical Model, Belief Propagation is a heuristic which is quite successful in practice, even though its empirical success, typically, lacks theoretical gu…
Model captures decision-making under bounded rationality with prior beliefs and market feedback.
By elaborating on the notion of linear belief functions (Dempster 1990; Liu 1996), we propose an elementary approach to knowledge representation for expert systems using linear belief functions. We show how to use basic matrices to represent market information and financial knowledge, including complete ignorance, stat…
This paper optimizes reinsurance contracts with belief differences between insurer and reinsurer.
Performing knowledge transfer from a large teacher network to a smaller student is a popular task in modern deep learning applications. However, due to growing dataset sizes and stricter privacy regulations, it is increasingly common not to have access to the data that was used to train the teacher. We propose a novel …
Deep belief networks are a powerful way to model complex probability distributions. However, learning the structure of a belief network, particularly one with hidden units, is difficult. The Indian buffet process has been used as a nonparametric Bayesian prior on the directed structure of a belief network with a single…
In this paper I empirically investigate prediction markets for binary options. Advocates of prediction markets have suggested that asset prices are consistent estimators of the "true" probability of a state of the world being realized. I test whether the market reaches a "consensus." I find little evidence for converge…
New algorithm reduces communication in distributed learning by sharing compressed beliefs.
New -BP algorithm improves belief propagation for graphs with loops.