A Natural Law of Succession
Report ID: TR-495-95Author: Ristad, Eric Sven
Date: 1995-07-00
Pages: 22
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Abstract:
Consider the following problem. You are given an alphabet of $k$ distinct symbols and are told that the i-th symbol occurred exactly n_i times in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the conditional probability that the next symbol will be i. In this report, we present a new solution to this fundamental problem in statistics and inductive reasoning. Our solution overcomes all practical difficulties encountered by standard approaches without requiring any special prior knowledge.