Thomas Bayes - 2025 ACF Nationals

Tossup

In methods named for this man, plate notation simplifies repetitive parts of PGMs. This man’s namesake “regret” is bounded through (10[1])Thompson sampling, which applies a statement named for him after (-5[1])each step. In models named for him, (10[1])colliders and non-colliders (10[1])are (10[1])used to determine whether two vertices are d-separated. A data structure named for this man is used in his “variational” method, which is applied to models like latent Dirichlet (“dee-rick-LAY”) allocation. It’s not Schwarz, (10[1])but the Akaike (“ah-kah-EE-kay”) information (10[2])criterion (10[1])penalizes (10[1])complexity (10[1])less strongly (10[1])than (10[1])this man’s namesake model selection (10[1])criterion. MAP estimates are generated through this man’s namesake inference, (10[2])in (10[1])contrast (10[1])to MLE (10[1])estimates (10[1])generated through frequentist (10[3])inference. (10[1])For 10 points, what statistician (10[1])names a statement that relates prior and posterior conditional probabilities? ■END■

ANSWER: Thomas Bayes [accept Bayesian inference or Bayesian regret or Bayesian network or Bayes network or variational Bayesian methods or Bayes information criteria or Bayes theorem/law/rule; prompt on VB or BIC]

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Player	Team	Opponent	Position	Value
David Bass	Johns Hopkins	Texas	19	10
Tim Morrison	Stanford	UC Berkeley A	29	-5
Isaac Mammel	Maryland	RIT	36	10
Geoffrey Wu	Columbia A	Toronto A	39	10
Liam Kusalik	Waterloo A	Illinois A	40	10
Nathan Sheffield	MIT	Minnesota	73	10
Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford	North Carolina A	WUSTL A	77	10
Parth Jagtap	Toronto C	Cornell A	77	10
Adam Fine	Chicago A	Indiana	78	10
Ryan Rosenberg	NYU	Ottawa	79	10
Thomas Tibbetts	UCF	Virginia	80	10
Yash Mandavia	Illinois B	Michigan	82	10
Liam Starnes	Chicago B	Virginia Tech	83	10
Julian Bushlow	Cornell B	Vanderbilt	88	10
Vikshar Athreya	Rutgers	Northwestern	98	10
Anuttam Ramji	UC Berkeley B	Waterloo B	98	10
Amogh Kulkarni	Georgia State	Penn State	99	10
Rohan Dalal	Georgia Tech	Toronto B	100	10
Henry Bon	Winona State	North Carolina B	102	10
Eve Fleisig	UC Berkeley A	Stanford	103	10
Conor Thompson	Iowa State	Harvard	106	10
Albert Yingzhi Nyang	LSE	Yale	106	10
John John Groger	WUSTL B	Florida	106	10
Tai Belke	British Columbia	Arizona State	107	10
Roxanne Tang	Ohio State	Columbia B	112	10

Summary

Tournament	Exact Match?	TUH	Conv. %	Power %	Neg %	Average Buzz
2025 ACF Nationals	Yes	24	100%	0%	4%	82.83