The Geometry of Decision Theory

A decision problem is defined in terms of an outcome space, an action space and a loss function. Starting from these simple ingredients, we can construct: Proper Scoring Rule; Entropy Function; Divergence Function; Riemannian Metric; and Unbiased Estimating Equation. We illustrate these for the case of a Riemannian outcome space. From an abstract viewpoint, the loss function defines a duality between the outcome and action spaces, while the correspondence between a distribution and its Bayes act induces a self-duality. Together these determine a “decision geometry” for the family of distributions on outcome space. This allows generalisation of many standard statistical concepts and properties. In particular we define and study generalised exponential families.