Are UFOs Actually Aliens? Bayes’ Theorem Applied
Many photos released by the US military regarding unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings are blurry and vague, causing people to wonder: are these UFOs actually aliens? In the article, “UFOs: how to calculate the odds that an alien spaceship has been spotted,” Bayes rule is applied to assess the likelihood that these ‘UFOs’ could instead […]
Naive Bayes Classifers: an extension of Bayes’ Rule
As one of the most important theorems in probability/statistics, Bayes’ Rule rears its head in various fields. Classical applications of the theorem include medical tests and spam email detection. It serves to elegantly show how probability is easily updatable, along with the events for which it is representative. This proves important in data science […]
Apliganda as a Form of Information Cascade
We’ve all been witness to the power of social media and influencers, how one celebrity wearing a coat could revive a company, or how one person’s post could call to action many others. But in addition, to the top-down spread of information from an individual or an institution, social media brought along a bottom-up spread […]
Bayes’ Theorem and Predictive Models for Pollution
In class we learned about Bayes’ Rule and as a probability measure for uncertainty and its applications in the Herding experiment, where people guess whether the urn contains majority red or blue balls. We have also observed, through forming this mathematical model, that people’s decision eventually comes to a consensus as they are influenced by […]
Information Cascades and Social Learning in Financial Markets
When formulating our opinions and making choices, as humans, more often than not we rely on the information of others to make these decisions and conclusions. We tend to put aside what we truly believe our gut is telling us and go with what the greater population thinks. This causes the potential for an information […]
Targeted Advertising
Targeted advertising is something a vast majority of us experience. We see ads everyday, and it turns out a lot of them are, in someway, targeted. This isn’t news, and the general public agrees that phones can pick up key words from a conversation, and present an ad related to the topic of your personal […]
Pumping and Dumping in the Information Age
The “pump and dump” as well as other market manipulation tactics have been around since the advent of the stock market. In a pump and dump scheme, fraudsters artificially inflate prices of a stock by using cold calls, newspapers, and other forms of media to publish exaggerated, misleading, or false statements about the prospects of […]
A Classical Example of The Base Rate Fallacy
As part of the Information Cascades topic, we learned about the Base Rate Fallacy. In fact, the first time when I heard about this phenomenon was in the Introduction to Psychology class that I took a year ago. In this class, I learned about a famous psychology experiment designed by Bar-Hillel, in which participants are […]
Strange Shoes & Informational Cascades
This summer, the Wall Street Journal published an article exploring the recent trend in the increasing prevalence of ‘ugly shoes’—and how they keep ‘getting uglier’—over the past few years. While doing further research, I came across an academic article from three economists at the University of California, Los Angeles, who developed a theory that the […]
Information Cascades and New Technology
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93.892&rep=rep1&type=pdf The research paper “RUNNING WITH THE PACK: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF INFORMATION CASCADES IN THE ADOPTION OF NOVEL TECHNOLOGIES” by Eric A. Walden and Glenn J. Browne uses the theory of information cascades to describe how specific technologies become incorporated into everyday systems. Specifically, the authors develop an information cascade using the BHW […]
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