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Today is Jerzy Neyman’s Birthday (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981). I am posting a brief excerpt and a link to a paper of his that I hadn’t posted before: Neyman, J. (1962), ‘Two Breakthroughs in the Theory of Statistical Decision Making‘ [i] It’s chock full of ideas and arguments, but the one that interests me at the moment is Neyman’s conception of “his breakthrough”, in relation to a certain concept of “inference”. “In the present paper” he tells us, “the term ‘inferential theory’…will be used to describe the attempts to solve the Bayes’ problem with a reference to confidence, beliefs, etc., through some supplementation …either a substitute a priori distribution [exemplified by the so called principle of insufficient reason] or a new measure of uncertainty” such as Fisher’s fiducial probability. Now Neyman always distinguishes his error statistical performance conception from Bayesian and Fiducial probabilisms [ii]. The surprising twist here is semantical and the culprit is none other than…Allan Birnbaum. Yet Birnbaum gets short shrift, and no mention is made of our favorite “breakthrough” (or did I miss it?). [iii] I’ll explain in later stages of this post & in comments…(so please check back); I don’t want to miss the start of the birthday party in honor of Neyman, and it’s already 8:30 p.m in Berkeley!
Note: In this article,”attacks” on various statistical “fronts” refers to ways of attacking problems in one or another statistical research program. HAPPY BIRTHDAY NEYMAN! Continue reading
Error Statistics Philosophy 