The Opinion Pool

A Consensual Linear Opinion Pool

An important question when eliciting opinions from experts is how to aggregate the reported opinions. In this paper, we propose a pooling method to aggregate expert opinions. Intuitively, it works as if the experts were continuously updating their opinions in order to accommodate the expertise of others. Each updated opinion takes the form of a linear opinion pool, where the weight that an expe...

An ordinal characterization of the linear opinion pool

Given a collection of individual ordinal probabilities on a …nite state space, we discuss an ordinal condition that is necessary and su¢ cient for an ordinal probability to be represented as a weighted average of probability representations of the individual probabilities. We also give necessary and su¢ cient conditions for when such an ordinal probability can be represented as an unweighted av...

Transductive Log Opinion Pool of Gaussian Process Experts

We introduce a framework for analyzing transductive combination of Gaussian process (GP) experts, where independently trained GP experts are combined in a way that depends on test point location, in order to scale GPs to big data. The framework provides some theoretical justification for the generalized product of GP experts (gPoE-GP) which was previously shown to work well in practice [2, 3] b...

Target Independent Variance/Ambiguity for the Linear Opinion Pool and the Connection to the Exponential Family

Opinion Opinion Opinion

A common notion of vision, consistent with this excerpt from the first paragraph of David Marr’s seminal book [1], is gained by considering the predicament of a person with a searchlight placed in a pitch-dark room full of unfamiliar furniture. One would hope that, by swinging the beam around, the observer will be able to recognize the objects present in the room (a cat here, an aquarium there,...