1,842 research outputs found
Einstein's Real "Biggest Blunder"
Albert Einstein's real "biggest blunder" was not the 1917 introduction into
his gravitational field equations of a cosmological constant term \Lambda,
rather was his failure in 1916 to distinguish between the entirely different
concepts of active gravitational mass and passive gravitational mass. Had he
made the distinction, and followed David Hilbert's lead in deriving field
equations from a variational principle, he might have discovered a true (not a
cut and paste) Einstein-Rosen bridge and a cosmological model that would have
allowed him to predict, long before such phenomena were imagined by others,
inflation, a big bounce (not a big bang), an accelerating expansion of the
universe, dark matter, and the existence of cosmic voids, walls, filaments, and
nodes.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 11 references, Honorable Mention in 2012 Gravity
Research Foundation Essay Award
Patterns of Scalable Bayesian Inference
Datasets are growing not just in size but in complexity, creating a demand
for rich models and quantification of uncertainty. Bayesian methods are an
excellent fit for this demand, but scaling Bayesian inference is a challenge.
In response to this challenge, there has been considerable recent work based on
varying assumptions about model structure, underlying computational resources,
and the importance of asymptotic correctness. As a result, there is a zoo of
ideas with few clear overarching principles.
In this paper, we seek to identify unifying principles, patterns, and
intuitions for scaling Bayesian inference. We review existing work on utilizing
modern computing resources with both MCMC and variational approximation
techniques. From this taxonomy of ideas, we characterize the general principles
that have proven successful for designing scalable inference procedures and
comment on the path forward
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