Monthly Archives: October 2016

PSA 2016 Symposium:
Philosophy of Statistics in the Age of Big Data and Replication Crises
Friday November 4th  9-11:45 am (includes coffee  break 10-10:15)
Location: Piedmont 4 (12th Floor) Westin Peachtree Plaza
Speakers:

• Deborah Mayo (Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia) “Controversy Over the Significance Test Controversy” (Abstract)
• Gerd Gigerenzer (Director of Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany) “Surrogate Science: How Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, and Bayes Were Transformed into the Null Ritual” (Abstract)
• Andrew Gelman (Professor of Statistics & Political Science, Columbia University, New York) “Confirmationist and Falsificationist Paradigms in Statistical Practice” (Abstract)
• Clark Glymour (Alumni University Professor in Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) “Exploratory Research is More Reliable Than Confirmatory Research” (Abstract)

Key Words: big data, frequentist and Bayesian philosophies, history and philosophy of statistics, meta-research, p-values, replication, significance tests.

Summary:

Science is undergoing a crisis over reliability and reproducibility. High-powered methods are prone to cherry-picking correlations, significance-seeking, and assorted modes of extraordinary rendition of data. The Big Data revolution may encourage a reliance on statistical methods without sufficient scrutiny of whether they are teaching us about causal processes of interest. Mounting failures of replication in the social and biological sciences have resulted in new institutes for meta-research, replication research, and widespread efforts to restore scientific integrity and transparency. Statistical significance test controversies, long raging in the social sciences, have spread to all fields using statistics. At the same time, foundational debates over frequentist and Bayesian methods have shifted in important ways that are often overlooked in the debates. The problems introduce philosophical and methodological questions about probabilistic tools, and science and pseudoscience—intertwined with technical statistics and the philosophy and history of statistics. Our symposium goal is to address foundational issues around which the current crisis in science revolves. We combine the insights of philosophers, psychologists, and statisticians whose work interrelates philosophy and history of statistics, data analysis and modeling. Continue reading →

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Formal Epistemology Workshop (FEW) 2017

Call for papers

Submission Deadline: December 1st, 2016
Authors Notified: February 8th, 2017

We invite papers in formal epistemology, broadly construed. FEW is an interdisciplinary conference, and so we welcome submissions from researchers in philosophy, statistics, economics, computer science, psychology, and mathematics.

Submissions should be prepared for blind review. Contributors ought to upload a full paper of no more than 6000 words and an abstract of up to 300 words to the Easychair website. Please submit your full paper in .pdf format. The deadline for submissions is December 1st, 2016. Authors will be notified on February 1st, 2017.

The final selection of the program will be made with an eye towards diversity. We especially encourage submissions from PhD candidates, early career researchers and members of groups that are underrepresented in philosophy. Continue reading →

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International Prize in Statistics Awarded to Sir David Cox for
Survival Analysis Model Applied in Medicine, Science, and Engineering

EMBARGOED until October 19, 2016, at 9 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, VA (October 18, 2016) – Prominent British statistician Sir David Cox has been named the inaugural recipient of the International Prize in Statistics. Like the acclaimed Fields Medal, Abel Prize, Turing Award and Nobel Prize, the International Prize in Statistics is considered the highest honor in its field. It will be bestowed every other year to an individual or team for major achievements using statistics to advance science, technology and human welfare.

Cox is a giant in the field of statistics, but the International Prize in Statistics Foundation is recognizing him specifically for his 1972 paper in which he developed the proportional hazards model that today bears his name. The Cox Model is widely used in the analysis of survival data and enables researchers to more easily identify the risks of specific factors for mortality or other survival outcomes among groups of patients with disparate characteristics. From disease risk assessment and treatment evaluation to product liability, school dropout, reincarceration and AIDS surveillance systems, the Cox Model has been applied essentially in all fields of science, as well as in engineering. Continue reading →