Physics – Condensed Matter – Statistical Mechanics
Scientific paper
2004-09-08
p. 429 in "Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering" ed. by R. Fischer et al. (A.I.P. Vol. 73
Physics
Condensed Matter
Statistical Mechanics
Presented at MaxEnt 2004, the 24th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods (July 25-30, 2004,
Scientific paper
10.1063/1.1835241
What is a question? According to Cox a question can be identified with the set of assertions that constitute possible answers. In this paper we propose a different approach that combines the notion that questions are requests for information with the notion that probability distributions represent uncertainties resulting from lack of information. This suggests that to each probability distribution one can naturally associate that particular question which requests the information that is missing and vice-versa. We propose to represent questions q by probability distributions Next we consider how questions relate to each other: to what extent is finding the answer to one question relevant to answering another? A natural measure of relevance is derived by requiring that it satisfy three desirable features (three axioms). We find that the relevance of a question q to another question Q turns out to be the relative entropy S[q,Q] of the corresponding distributions. An application to statistical physics is briefly considered.
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