Ben Recht

“Are Controversies in Statistics Relevant for Responsible AI/ML? (My talk at an AI ethics conference) (ii)

Bayesians, frequentists and AI/ML researchers

1. Introduction

I gave a talk on March 8 at an AI, Systems, and Society Conference at the Emory Center for Ethics. The organizer, Alex Tolbert (who had been a student at Virginia Tech), suggested I speak about controversies in statistics, especially P-hacking in statistical significance testing. A question that arises led to my title:
Are Controversies in Statistics Relevant for Responsible AI/ML?”

Since I was the last speaker, thereby being the only thing separating attendees from their next destination, I decided to give an overview in the first third of my slides. I’ve pasted the slideshare below this post. I want to discuss the main parallel that interests me between P-hacking significance tests in the two fields (sections 1 and 2), as well as some queries raised by my commentator, Ben Jantzen, and another participant Ben Recht (section 3). Let me begin with my abstract: Continue reading

Categories: AI/ML, Ben Janzen, Ben Recht, biasing selection effects, severity | 18 Comments

Response to Ben Recht’s post (“What is Statistics’ Purpose?”) on my Neyman seminar (ii)

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There was a very valuable panel discussion after my October 9 Neyman Seminar in the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley.  I want to respond to many of the questions put forward by the participants (Ben Recht, Philip Stark, Bin Yu, Snow Zhang)  that we did not address during that panel. Slides from my presentation, “Severity as a basic concept of philosophy of statistics” are at the end of this post (but with none of the animations). I begin in this post by responding to Ben Recht, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Berkeley, and his recent blogpost, What is Statistics’ Purpose? On severe testing, regulation, and butter passing, on my talk. I will consider: (1) A complex or leading question; (2) Why I chose to focus about Neyman’s philosophy of statistics and (3) What the “100 years of fighting and browbeating” were/are all about. Continue reading

Categories: affirming the consequent, Ben Recht, Neyman, P-values, Severity, statistical significance tests, statistics wars | 10 Comments

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