Without prior knowledge, we often want prior distributions that are non-informativeโ€”with small influence on the posterior. Sometimes, we can set our prior to have hyperparameters that minimize the impact on the posterior, even if our prior distribution becomes improper (doesnโ€™t integrate to finite amount).

For our non-informative prior, another important principle is Jeffreyโ€™s Invariance Principle: a non-informative prior should stay non-informative under any transformations of . Following this principle, we have a special kind of non-informative prior, called Jeffreyโ€™s prior, that remains invariant under change of coordinates for . This prior follows the formula

where is the expected Fisher information,