Webinar: What is Importance?
Stefan Conrady, Bayesia USA
Context & Motivation
Everybody knows the meaning of "importance," right? "What is important?" is a common question in daily life, and it is presumably the most common question in research. It's all about attempting to understand what matters within the context of a given domain.
Upon entering the world of statistics and analytics, we encounter a myriad of measures all related to importance, e.g., correlation, weight, significance, indirect/direct effect size, temporal/contemporaneous effects, unit effect, standardized effect, Bayes Factor, Mutual Information, KL-Divergence, contribution, elasticity, etc. Additionally, some of these measures should not be used in isolation but instead need to be seen in conjunction with other quantities, such as joint probability, for decision-making purposes. This highlights that "importance" is not at all a narrowly-defined concept but that it instead covers a broad and diverse spectrum of notions.
While none of these measures are tied to Bayesian networks, we employ this framework to explain major and minor differences between these concepts. More specifically, we attempt to develop an intuition for all of the above concepts using machine-learned Bayesian network models. Our objective is to understand in which contexts what measures of importance are most appropriate to use.
Presentation Video
Presentation Materials
Bayesian Network Model for Diagnosis.xbl
About the Presenter
Stefan Conrady has over 20 years of experience in decision analysis, analytics, market research, and product strategy with Mercedes-Benz, BMW Group, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, and Nissan, which included assignments in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Today, in his role as Managing Partner of Bayesia USA and Bayesia Singapore, he is recognized as a thought leader in applying Bayesian networks for research, analytics, and reasoning.
Recently, Stefan and his colleague Dr. Lionel Jouffe co-authored Bayesian Networks & BayesiaLab โ A Practical Introduction for Researchers, which is now available as an e-book.
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