A little more on aggregating incoherent credences

Last week, I wrote about a problem that arises if you wish to aggregate the credal judgments of a group of agents when one or more of those agents has incoherent credences. I focussed on the case of two agents, Adila and Benoit, who have credence functions $c_A$ and $c_B$, respectively. $c_A$ and $c_B$ are defined over just two propositions, $X$ and its negation $\bar{X}$.

I noted that there are two natural ways to aggregate $c_A$ and $c_B$ for someone who adheres to Probabilism, the principle that says that credences should be coherent. You might first fix up Adila's and Benoit's credences so that they are coherent, and then aggregate them using linear pooling -- let's call that fix-then-pool. Or you might aggregate Adila's and Benoit's credences using linear pooling, and then fix up the pooled credences so that they are coherent -- let's call that pool-then-fix. And I noted that, for some natural ways of fixing up incoherent credences, fix-then-pool gives a different result from pool-then-fix. This, I claimed, creates a dilemma for the person doing the aggregating, since there seems to be no principled reason to favour either method.

How do we fix up incoherent credences? Well, a natural idea is to find the coherent credences that are closest to them and adopt those in their place. This obviously requires a measure of distance between two credence functions. In last week's post, I considered two:

Squared Euclidean Distance (SED) For two credence functions $c$, $c^{\prime }$ defined on a set of propositions $X_1$, $\dots$, $X_n$,$$SED(c,c^{\prime })=\sum _{i=1}^n(c(X_i)-c^{\prime }(X_i){)}^2$$

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence (GKL) For two credence functions $c$, $c^{\prime }$ defined on a set of propositions $X_1$, $\dots$, $X_n$,$$GKL(c,c^{\prime })=\sum _{i=1}^{n}c(X_i)\log \frac{c(X_i)}{c^{\prime }(X_i)}-\sum _{i=1}^{n}c(X_i)+\sum _{i=1}^n{c}^{\prime }(X_i)$$

If we use $SED$ when we are fixing incoherent credences -- that is, if we fix an incoherent credence function $c$ by adopting the coherent credence function $c^{\ast }$ for which $SED(c^{\ast },c)$ is minimal -- then fix-then-pool gives the same results as pool-then-fix.

If we use GKL when we are fixing incoherent credences -- that is, if we fix an incoherent credence function $c$ by adopting the coherent credence function $c^{\ast }$ for which $GKL(c^{\ast },c)$ is minimal -- then fix-then-pool gives different results from pool-then-fix.

Since last week's post, I've been reading this paper by Joel Predd, Daniel Osherson, Sanjeev Kulkarni, and Vincent Poor. They suggest that we pool and fix incoherent credences in one go using a method called the Coherent Aggregation Principle (CAP), formulated in this paper by Daniel Osherson and Moshe Vardi. In its original version, CAP says that we should aggregate Adila's and Benoit's credences by taking the coherent credence function $c$ such that the sum of the distance of $c$ from $c_A$ and the distance of $c$ from $c_B$ is minimized. That is,

CAP Given a measure of distance $D$ between credence functions, we should pick that coherent credence function $c$ such that minimizes $D(c,c_A)+D(c,c_B)$.

As they note, if we take $SED$ to be our measure of distance, then this method generalizes the aggregation procedure on coherent credences that just takes straight averages of credences. That is, CAP entails unweighted linear pooling:

Unweighted Linear Pooling If $c_A$ and $c_B$ are coherent, then the aggregation of $c_A$ and $c_B$ is $$\frac{1}{2}{c}_A+\frac{1}{2}{c}_B$$

We can generalize this result a little by taking a weighted sum of the distances, rather than the straight sum.

Weighted CAP Given a measure of distance $D$ between credence functions, and given $0\le \alpha leq1$, we should pick the coherent credence function $c$ that minimizes $\alpha D(c,c_A)+(1-\alpha )D(c,c_B)$.

If we take $SED$ to measure the distance between credence functions, then this method generalizes linear pooling. That is, Weighted CAP entails linear pooling:

Linear Pooling If $c_A$ and $c_B$ are coherent, then the aggregation of $c_A$ and $c_B$ is $$\alpha c_A+(1-\alpha )c_B$$ for some $0\le \alpha \le 1$.

What's more, when distance is measured by $SED$, Weighted CAP agrees with fix-then-pool and with pool-then-fix (providing the fixing is done using $SED$ as well). Thus, when we use $SED$, all of the methods for aggregating incoherent credences that we've considered agree. In particular, they all recommend the following credence in $X$: $$\frac{1}{2}+\frac{\alpha (c_A(X)-c_A(\bar{X}))+(1-\alpha )(c_B(X)-c_B(\bar{X}))}{2}$$

However, the story is not nearly so neat and tidy if we measure the distance between two credence functions using $GKL$. Here's the credence in $X$ recommended by fix-then-pool:$$\alpha \frac{c_A(X)}{c_A(X)+c_A(\bar{X})}+(1-\alpha )\frac{c_B(X)}{c_B(X)+c_B(\bar{X})}$$ Here's the credence in $X$ recommended by pool-then-fix: $$\frac{\alpha c_A(X)+(1-\alpha )c_B(X)}{\alpha (c_A(X)+c_A(\bar{X}))+(1-\alpha )(c_B(X)+c_B(\bar{X}))}$$ And here's the credence in $X$ recommended by Weighted CAP: $$\frac{c_A(X{)}^{\alpha }{c}_B(X{)}^{1-\alpha }}{c_A(X{)}^{\alpha }{c}_B(X{)}^{1-\alpha }+c_A(\bar{X}{)}^{\alpha }{c}_B(\bar{X}{)}^{1-\alpha }}$$ For many values of $\alpha$, $c_A(X)$, $c_A(\bar{X})$, $c_B(X)$, $c_B(\bar{X})$ these will give three distinct results.