lone book on table
Today is Erich Lehmann’s birthday (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009). Lehmann was Neyman’s first student at Berkeley (Ph.D 1942), and his framing of Neyman-Pearson (NP) methods has had an enormous influence on the way we typically view them.
I got to know Erich in 1997, shortly after publication of EGEK (1996). One day, I received a bulging, six-page, handwritten letter from him in tiny, extremely neat scrawl (and many more after that). He began by telling me that he was sitting in a very large room at an ASA (American Statistical Association) meeting where they were shutting down the conference book display (or maybe they were setting it up), and on a very long, wood table sat just one book, all alone, shiny red. He said he wondered if it might be of interest to him! So he walked up to it…. It turned out to be my Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (1996, Chicago), which he reviewed soon after[0]. (What are the chances?) Some related posts on Lehmann’s letter are here and here.
One of Lehmann’s more philosophical papers is Lehmann (1993), “The Fisher, Neyman-Pearson Theories of Testing Hypotheses: One Theory or Two?” We haven’t discussed it before on this blog. Here are some excerpts (blue), and remarks (black)
Erich Lehmann 20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009
…A distinction frequently made between the approaches of Fisher and Neyman-Pearson is that in the latter the test is carried out at a fixed level, whereas the principal outcome of the former is the statement of a p value that may or may not be followed by a pronouncement concerning significance of the result [p.1243].
The history of this distinction is curious. Throughout the 19th century, testing was carried out rather informally. It was roughly equivalent to calculating an (approximate) p value and rejecting the hypothesis if this value appeared to be sufficiently small. … Fisher, in his 1925 book and later, greatly reduced the needed tabulations by providing tables not of the distributions themselves but of selected quantiles. … These tables allow the calculation only of ranges for the p values; however, they are exactly suited for determining the critical values at which the statistic under consideration becomes significant at a given level. As Fisher wrote in explaining the use of his [chi square] table (1946, p. 80):
In preparing this table we have borne in mind that in practice we do not want to know the exact value of P for any observed [chi square], but, in the first place, whether or not the observed value is open to suspicion. If P is between .1 and .9, there is certainly no reason to suspect the hypothesis tested. If it is below .02, it is strongly indicated that the hypothesis fails to account for the whole of the facts. We shall not often be astray if we draw a conventional line at .05 and consider that higher values of [chi square] indicate a real discrepancy.
Similarly, he also wrote (1935, p. 13) that “it is usual and convenient for experimenters to take 5 percent as a standard level of significance, in the sense that they are prepared to ignore all results which fail to reach this standard .. .” …. Continue reading →
Error Statistics Philosophy 