Monthly Archives: June 2017

3 YEARS AGO (JUNE 2014): MEMORY LANE

Posted on June 25, 2017 by Mayo
3 years ago...

3 years ago…

MONTHLY MEMORY LANE: 3 years ago: June 2014. I mark in red 3-4 posts from each month that seem most apt for general background on key issues in this blog, excluding those reblogged recently[1], and in green up to 4 others of general relevance to philosophy of statistics [2].  Posts that are part of a “unit” or a group count as one.

June 2014

  • (6/5) Stephen Senn: Blood Simple? The complicated and controversial world of bioequivalence (guest post)
  • (6/9) “The medical press must become irrelevant to publication of clinical trials.”
  • (6/11) A. Spanos: “Recurring controversies about P values and confidence intervals revisited”
  • (6/14) “Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science: where should they meet?”
  • (6/21) Big Bayes Stories? (draft ii)
  • (6/25) Blog Contents: May 2014
  • (6/28) Sir David Hendry Gets Lifetime Achievement Award
  • (6/30) Some ironies in the ‘replication crisis’ in social psychology (4th and final installment)

[1] Monthly memory lanes began at the blog’s 3-year anniversary in Sept, 2014.

[2] New Rule, July 30,2016, March 30,2017 (moved to 4) -very convenient way to allow data-dependent choices.

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Can You Change Your Bayesian Prior? The one post whose comments (some of them) will appear in my new book

Posted on June 18, 2017 by Mayo

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I blogged this exactly 2 years ago here, seeking insight for my new book (Mayo 2017). Over 100 (rather varied) interesting comments ensued. This is the first time I’m incorporating blog comments into published work. You might be interested to follow the nooks and crannies from back then, or add a new comment to this.

This is one of the questions high on the “To Do” list I’ve been keeping for this blog.  The question grew out of discussions of “updating and downdating” in relation to papers by Stephen Senn (2011) and Andrew Gelman (2011) in Rationality, Markets, and Morals.[i]

“As an exercise in mathematics [computing a posterior based on the client’s prior probabilities] is not superior to showing the client the data, eliciting a posterior distribution and then calculating the prior distribution; as an exercise in inference Bayesian updating does not appear to have greater claims than ‘downdating’.” (Senn, 2011, p. 59)

“If you could really express your uncertainty as a prior distribution, then you could just as well observe data and directly write your subjective posterior distribution, and there would be no need for statistical analysis at all.” (Gelman, 2011, p. 77)

But if uncertainty is not expressible as a prior, then a major lynchpin for Bayesian updating seems questionable. If you can go from the posterior to the prior, on the other hand, perhaps it can also lead you to come back and change it.

Is it legitimate to change one’s prior based on the data? Continue reading →

Categories: Bayesian priors, Bayesian/frequentist

Performance or Probativeness? E.S. Pearson’s Statistical Philosophy

Posted on June 12, 2017 by Mayo
egon pearson

E.S. Pearson (11 Aug, 1895-12 June, 1980)

E.S. Pearson died on this day in 1980. Aside from being co-developer of Neyman-Pearson statistics, Pearson was interested in philosophical aspects of statistical inference. A question he asked is this: Are methods with good error probabilities of use mainly to supply procedures which will not err too frequently in some long run? (performance). Or is it the other way round: that the control of long run error properties are of crucial importance for probing the causes of the data at hand? (probativeness). I say no to the former and yes to the latter. But how exactly does it work? It’s not just the frequentist error statistician who faces this question, but also some contemporary Bayesians who aver that the performance or calibration of their methods supplies an evidential (or inferential or epistemic) justification (e.g., Robert Kass 2011). The latter generally ties the reliability of the method that produces the particular inference C to degrees of belief in C. The inference takes the form of a probabilism, e.g., Pr(C|x), equated, presumably, to the reliability (or coverage probability) of the method. But why? The frequentist inference is C, which is qualified by the reliability of the method, but there’s no posterior assigned C. Again, what’s the rationale? I think existing answers (from both tribes) come up short in non-trivial ways. Continue reading →

Categories: E.S. Pearson, highly probable vs highly probed, phil/history of stat

3 YEARS AGO (May 2014): MEMORY LANE

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Mayo
3 years ago...

3 years ago…

MONTHLY MEMORY LANE: 3 years ago: May 2014. I leave them unmarked this month, read whatever looks interesting.

May 2014

  • (5/1) Putting the brakes on the breakthrough: An informal look at the argument for the Likelihood Principle
  • (5/3) You can only become coherent by ‘converting’ non-Bayesianly
  • (5/6) Winner of April Palindrome contest: Lori Wike
  • (5/7) A. Spanos: Talking back to the critics using error statistics (Phil6334)
  • (5/10) Who ya gonna call for statistical Fraudbusting? R.A. Fisher, P-values, and error statistics (again)
  • (5/15) Scientism and Statisticism: a conference* (i)
  • (5/17) Deconstructing Andrew Gelman: “A Bayesian wants everybody else to be a non-Bayesian.”
  • (5/20) The Science Wars & the Statistics Wars: More from the Scientism workshop
  • (5/25) Blog Table of Contents: March and April 2014
  • (5/27) Allan Birnbaum, Philosophical Error Statistician: 27 May 1923 – 1 July 1976
  • (5/31) What have we learned from the Anil Potti training and test data frameworks? Part 1 (draft 2)

[1] Monthly memory lanes began at the blog’s 3-year anniversary in Sept, 2014.

 

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