Fisher

Happy Birthday R.A. Fisher: ‘Two New Properties of Mathematical Likelihood’

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Mayo

17 February 1890–29 July 1962

Today is R.A. Fisher’s birthday. I’ll post some Fisherian items this week in honor of it. This paper comes just before the conflicts with Neyman and Pearson erupted. Fisher links his tests and sufficiency, to the Neyman and Pearson lemma in terms of power. It’s as if we may see them as ending up in a similar place while starting from different origins. I quote just the most relevant portions…the full article is linked below. Happy Birthday Fisher!

“Two New Properties of Mathematical Likelihood“

by R.A. Fisher, F.R.S.

Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, 144: 285-307 (1934)

The property that where a sufficient statistic exists, the likelihood, apart from a factor independent of the parameter to be estimated, is a function only of the parameter and the sufficient statistic, explains the principle result obtained by Neyman and Pearson in discussing the efficacy of tests of significance. Neyman and Pearson introduce the notion that any chosen test of a hypothesis H₀ is more powerful than any other equivalent test, with regard to an alternative hypothesis H₁, when it rejects H₀ in a set of samples having an assigned aggregate frequency ε when H₀ is true, and the greatest possible aggregate frequency when H₁ is true. If any group of samples can be found within the region of rejection whose probability of occurrence on the hypothesis H₁ is less than that of any other group of samples outside the region, but is not less on the hypothesis H₀, then the test can evidently be made more powerful by substituting the one group for the other. Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, phil/history of stat, Statistics | Tags: Bayesianism, induction, Ronald Fisher, significance tests

Erich Lehmann’s 100 Birthday: Neyman Pearson vs Fisher on P-values

Posted on November 19, 2017 by Mayo

Erich Lehmann 20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009

Erich Lehmann was born 100 years ago today! (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 ” I wonder if it might be of interest to me!” 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.

Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, P-values, phil/history of stat

S. Senn: Fishing for fakes with Fisher (Guest Post)

Posted on July 1, 2017 by Mayo

Stephen Senn
Head of Competence Center
for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS)
Luxembourg Institute of Health
Twitter @stephensenn

Fishing for fakes with Fisher

Stephen Senn

The essential fact governing our analysis is that the errors due to soil heterogeneity will be divided by a good experiment into two portions. The first, which is to be made as large as possible, will be completely eliminated, by the arrangement of the experiment, from the experimental comparisons, and will be as carefully eliminated in the statistical laboratory from the estimate of error. As to the remainder, which cannot be treated in this way, no attempt will be made to eliminate it in the field, but, on the contrary, it will be carefully randomised so as to provide a valid estimate of the errors to which the experiment is in fact liable. R. A. Fisher, The Design of Experiments, (Fisher 1990) section 28.

Fraudian analysis?

John Carlisle must be a man endowed with exceptional energy and determination. A recent paper of his is entitled, ‘Data fabrication and other reasons for non-random sampling in 5087 randomised, controlled trials in anaesthetic and general medical journals,’ (Carlisle 2017) and has created quite a stir. The journals examined include the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. What Carlisle did was examine 29,789 variables using 72,261 means to see if they were ‘consistent with random sampling’ (by which, I suppose, he means ‘randomisation’). The papers chosen had to report either standard deviations or standard errors of the mean. P-values as measures of balance or lack of it were then calculated using each of three methods and the method that gave the value closest to 0.5 was chosen. For a given trial the P-values chosen were then back-converted to z-scores combined by summing them and then re-converted back to P-values using a method that assumes the summed Z-scores to be independent. As Carlisle writes, ‘All p values were one-sided and inverted, such that dissimilar means generated p values near 1’. Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, RCTs, Stephen Senn

“Fusion-Confusion?” My Discussion of Nancy Reid: “BFF Four- Are we Converging?”

Posted on May 2, 2017 by Mayo

Here are the slides from my discussion of Nancy Reid today at BFF4: The Fourth Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist Workshop: May 1-3, 2017 (hosted by Harvard University)

Categories: Bayesian/frequentist, C.S. Peirce, confirmation theory, fiducial probability, Fisher, law of likelihood, Popper | Tags: Hacking

Slides from the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science: “Severe Testing: The Key to Error Correction”

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Mayo

Slides from my March 17 presentation on “Severe Testing: The Key to Error Correction” given at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science Alfred I.Taub forum on “Understanding Reproducibility and Error Correction in Science.”

Categories: fallacy of rejection, Fisher, fraud, frequentist/Bayesian, Likelihood Principle, reforming the reformers

R.A Fisher: “It should never be true, though it is still often said, that the conclusions are no more accurate than the data on which they are based”

Posted on February 26, 2017 by Mayo

A final entry in a week of recognizing R.A.Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962). Fisher is among the very few thinkers I have come across to recognize this crucial difference between induction and deduction:

In deductive reasoning all knowledge obtainable is already latent in the postulates. Rigorous is needed to prevent the successive inferences growing less and less accurate as we proceed. The conclusions are never more accurate than the data. In inductive reasoning we are performing part of the process by which new knowledge is created. The conclusions normally grow more and more accurate as more data are included. It should never be true, though it is still often said, that the conclusions are no more accurate than the data on which they are based. Statistical data are always erroneous, in greater or less degree. The study of inductive reasoning is the study of the embryology of knowledge, of the processes by means of which truth is extracted from its native ore in which it is infused with much error. (Fisher, “The Logic of Inductive Inference,” 1935, p 54).

Reading/rereading this paper is very worthwhile for interested readers. Some of the fascinating historical/statistical background may be found in a guest post by Aris Spanos: “R.A.Fisher: How an Outsider Revolutionized Statistics”

Categories: Fisher, phil/history of stat

Guest Blog: STEPHEN SENN: ‘Fisher’s alternative to the alternative’

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Mayo

“You May Believe You Are a Bayesian But You Are Probably Wrong”

As part of the week of recognizing R.A.Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962), I reblog a guest post by Stephen Senn from 2012. (I will comment in the comments.)

‘Fisher’s alternative to the alternative’

By: Stephen Senn

[2012 marked] the 50th anniversary of RA Fisher’s death. It is a good excuse, I think, to draw attention to an aspect of his philosophy of significance testing. In his extremely interesting essay on Fisher, Jimmie Savage drew attention to a problem in Fisher’s approach to testing. In describing Fisher’s aversion to power functions Savage writes, ‘Fisher says that some tests are more sensitive than others, and I cannot help suspecting that that comes to very much the same thing as thinking about the power function.’ (Savage 1976) (P473).

The modern statistician, however, has an advantage here denied to Savage. Savage’s essay was published posthumously in 1976 and the lecture on which it was based was given in Detroit on 29 December 1971 (P441). At that time Fisher’s scientific correspondence did not form part of his available oeuvre but in 1990 Henry Bennett’s magnificent edition of Fisher’s statistical correspondence (Bennett 1990) was published and this throws light on many aspects of Fisher’s thought including on significance tests. Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, S. Senn, Statistics

R.A. Fisher: “Statistical methods and Scientific Induction”

Posted on February 20, 2017 by Mayo

I continue a week of Fisherian posts in honor of his birthday (Feb 17). This is his contribution to the “Triad”–an exchange between Fisher, Neyman and Pearson 20 years after the Fisher-Neyman break-up. They are each very short.

17 February 1890 — 29 July 1962

“Statistical Methods and Scientific Induction”

by Sir Ronald Fisher (1955)

SUMMARY

The attempt to reinterpret the common tests of significance used in scientific research as though they constituted some kind of acceptance procedure and led to “decisions” in Wald’s sense, originated in several misapprehensions and has led, apparently, to several more.

The three phrases examined here, with a view to elucidating they fallacies they embody, are:

“Repeated sampling from the same population”,
Errors of the “second kind”,
“Inductive behavior”.

Mathematicians without personal contact with the Natural Sciences have often been misled by such phrases. The errors to which they lead are not only numerical.

To continue reading Fisher’s paper.

The most noteworthy feature is Fisher’s position on Fiducial inference, typically downplayed. I’m placing a summary and link to Neyman’s response below–it’s that interesting. Continue reading →

Categories: fiducial probability, Fisher, Neyman, phil/history of stat

Guest Blog: ARIS SPANOS: The Enduring Legacy of R. A. Fisher

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Mayo

By Aris Spanos

One of R. A. Fisher’s (17 February 1890 — 29 July 1962) most remarkable, but least recognized, achievement was to initiate the recasting of statistical induction. Fisher (1922) pioneered modern frequentist statistics as a model-based approach to statistical induction anchored on the notion of a statistical model, formalized by:

M_θ(x)={f(x;θ); θ∈Θ}; x∈Rⁿ;Θ⊂R^m; m < n; (1)

where the distribution of the sample f(x;θ) ‘encapsulates’ the probabilistic information in the statistical model.

Before Fisher, the notion of a statistical model was vague and often implicit, and its role was primarily conﬁned to the description of the distributional features of the data in hand using the histogram and the ﬁrst few sample moments; implicitly imposing random (IID) samples. The problem was that statisticians at the time would use descriptive summaries of the data to claim generality beyond the data in hand x₀:=(x₁,x₂,…,x_n) As late as the 1920s, the problem of statistical induction was understood by Karl Pearson in terms of invoking (i) the ‘stability’ of empirical results for subsequent samples and (ii) a prior distribution for θ.

Fisher was able to recast statistical inference by turning Karl Pearson’s approach, proceeding from data x₀in search of a frequency curve f(x;ϑ) to describe its histogram, on its head. He proposed to begin with a prespeciﬁed M_θ(x) (a ‘hypothetical inﬁnite population’), and view x₀as a ‘typical’ realization thereof; see Spanos (1999). Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, Spanos, Statistics | Tags: E S Pearson, Frequentist inference, induction, Jerzy Neyman, Models/Modelling, Ronald Fisher, statistical model

R.A. Fisher: ‘Two New Properties of Mathematical Likelihood’

Posted on February 17, 2017 by Mayo

17 February 1890–29 July 1962

Today is R.A. Fisher’s birthday. I’ll post some different Fisherian items this week in honor of it. This paper comes just before the conflicts with Neyman and Pearson erupted. Fisher links his tests and sufficiency, to the Neyman and Pearson lemma in terms of power. It’s as if we may see them as ending up in a similar place while starting from different origins. I quote just the most relevant portions…the full article is linked below. Happy Birthday Fisher!

“Two New Properties of Mathematical Likelihood“

by R.A. Fisher, F.R.S.

Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, 144: 285-307 (1934)

Categories: Fisher, phil/history of stat, Statistics | Tags: Bayesianism, induction, Ronald Fisher, significance tests

Gigerenzer at the PSA: “How Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, & Bayes Were Transformed into the Null Ritual”: Comments and Queries (ii)

Posted on November 8, 2016 by Mayo

Gerd Gigerenzer, Andrew Gelman, Clark Glymour and I took part in a very interesting symposium on Philosophy of Statistics at the Philosophy of Science Association last Friday. I jotted down lots of notes, but I’ll limit myself to brief reflections and queries on a small portion of each presentation in turn, starting with Gigerenzer’s “Surrogate Science: How Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, & Bayes Were Transformed into the Null Ritual.” His complete slides are below my comments. I may write this in stages, this being (i).

SLIDE #19

Good scientific practice–bold theories, double-blind experiments, minimizing measurement error, replication, etc.–became reduced in the social science to a surrogate: statistical significance.

I agree that “good scientific practice” isn’t some great big mystery, and that “bold theories, double-blind experiments, minimizing measurement error, replication, etc.” are central and interconnected keys to finding things out in error prone inquiry. Do the social sciences really teach that inquiry can be reduced to cookbook statistics? Or is it simply that, in some fields, carrying out surrogate science suffices to be a “success”? Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, frequentist/Bayesian, Gigerenzer, Gigerenzer, P-values, spurious p values, Statistics

Deconstructing the Fisher-Neyman conflict wearing fiducial glasses (continued)

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Mayo

Fisher/ Neyman

This continues my previous post: “Can’t take the fiducial out of Fisher…” in recognition of Fisher’s birthday, February 17. I supply a few more intriguing articles you may find enlightening to read and/or reread on a Saturday night

Move up 20 years to the famous 1955/56 exchange between Fisher and Neyman. Fisher clearly connects Neyman’s adoption of a behavioristic-performance formulation to his denying the soundness of fiducial inference. When “Neyman denies the existence of inductive reasoning, he is merely expressing a verbal preference. For him ‘reasoning’ means what ‘deductive reasoning’ means to others.” (Fisher 1955, p. 74).

Fisher was right that Neyman’s calling the outputs of statistical inferences “actions” merely expressed Neyman’s preferred way of talking. Nothing earth-shaking turns on the choice to dub every inference “an act of making an inference”.[i] The “rationality” or “merit” goes into the rule. Neyman, much like Popper, had a good reason for drawing a bright red line between his use of probability (for corroboration or probativeness) and its use by ‘probabilists’ (who assign probability to hypotheses). Fisher’s Fiducial probability was in danger of blurring this very distinction. Popper said, and Neyman would have agreed, that he had no problem with our using the word induction so long it was kept clear it meant testing hypotheses severely. Continue reading →

Categories: fiducial probability, Fisher, Neyman, Statistics

Can’t Take the Fiducial Out of Fisher (if you want to understand the N-P performance philosophy) [i]

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Mayo

R.A. Fisher: February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962

In recognition of R.A. Fisher’s birthday today, I’ve decided to share some thoughts on a topic that has so far has been absent from this blog: Fisher’s fiducial probability. Happy Birthday Fisher.

[Neyman and Pearson] “began an influential collaboration initially designed primarily, it would seem to clarify Fisher’s writing. This led to their theory of testing hypotheses and to Neyman’s development of confidence intervals, aiming to clarify Fisher’s idea of fiducial intervals (D.R.Cox, 2006, p. 195).

The entire episode of fiducial probability is fraught with minefields. Many say it was Fisher’s biggest blunder; others suggest it still hasn’t been understood. The majority of discussions omit the side trip to the Fiducial Forest altogether, finding the surrounding brambles too thorny to penetrate. Besides, a fascinating narrative about the Fisher-Neyman-Pearson divide has managed to bloom and grow while steering clear of fiducial probability–never mind that it remained a centerpiece of Fisher’s statistical philosophy. I now think that this is a mistake. It was thought, following Lehman (1993) and others, that we could take the fiducial out of Fisher and still understand the core of the Neyman-Pearson vs Fisher (or Neyman vs Fisher) disagreements. We can’t. Quite aside from the intrinsic interest in correcting the “he said/he said” of these statisticians, the issue is intimately bound up with the current (flawed) consensus view of frequentist error statistics.

So what’s fiducial inference? I follow Cox (2006), adapting for the case of the lower limit: Continue reading →

Categories: Error Statistics, fiducial probability, Fisher, Statistics

Sir Harold Jeffreys’ (tail area) one-liner: Sat night comedy [draft ii]

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Mayo

This headliner appeared two years ago, but to a sparse audience (likely because it was during winter break), so Management’s giving him another chance…

You might not have thought there could be new material for 2014, but there is, and if you look a bit more closely, you’ll see that it’s actually not Jay Leno [1] who is standing up there at the mike ….

It’s Sir Harold Jeffreys himself! And his (very famous) joke, I admit, is funny. So, since it’s Saturday night, let’s listen in on Sir Harold’s howler* in criticizing the use of p-values.

“Did you hear the one about significance testers rejecting H₀ because of outcomes H₀ didn’t predict?

‘What’s unusual about that?’ you ask?

What’s unusual, is that they do it when these unpredicted outcomes haven’t even occurred!”

Much laughter.

[The actual quote from Jeffreys: Using p-values implies that “An hypothesis that may be true is rejected because it has failed to predict observable results that have not occurred. This seems a remarkable procedure.” (Jeffreys 1939, 316)]

I say it’s funny, so to see why I’ll strive to give it a generous interpretation. Continue reading →

Categories: Comedy, Fisher, Jeffreys, P-values

NEYMAN: “Note on an Article by Sir Ronald Fisher” (3 uses for power, Fisher’s fiducial argument)

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Mayo

Note on an Article by Sir Ronald Fisher

By Jerzy Neyman (1956)

Summary

(1) FISHER’S allegation that, contrary to some passages in the introduction and on the cover of the book by Wald, this book does not really deal with experimental design is unfounded. In actual fact, the book is permeated with problems of experimentation. (2) Without consideration of hypotheses alternative to the one under test and without the study of probabilities of the two kinds, no purely probabilistic theory of tests is possible. (3) The conceptual fallacy of the notion of fiducial distribution rests upon the lack of recognition that valid probability statements about random variables usually cease to be valid if the random variables are replaced by their particular values. The notorious multitude of “paradoxes” of fiducial theory is a consequence of this oversight. (4) The idea of a “cost function for faulty judgments” appears to be due to Laplace, followed by Gauss.

1. Introduction

In a recent article (Fisher, 1955), Sir Ronald Fisher delivered an attack on a a substantial part of the research workers in mathematical statistics. My name is mentioned more frequently than any other and is accompanied by the more expressive invectives. Of the scientific questions raised by Fisher many were sufficiently discussed before (Neyman and Pearson, 1933; Neyman, 1937; Neyman, 1952). In the present note only the following points will be considered: (i) Fisher’s attack on the concept of errors of the second kind; (ii) Fisher’s reference to my objections to fiducial probability; (iii) Fisher’s reference to the origin of the concept of loss function and, before all, (iv) Fisher’s attack on Abraham Wald.

THIS SHORT (5 page) NOTE IS NEYMAN’S PORTION OF WHAT I CALL THE “TRIAD”. LET ME POINT YOU TO THE TOP HALF OF p. 291, AND THE DISCUSSION OF FIDUCIAL INFERENCE ON p. 292 HERE.

Categories: Fisher, Neyman, phil/history of stat, Statistics | Tags: Abraham Wald, Egon Pearson, significance tests

Sir Harold Jeffreys’ (tail area) one-liner: Saturday night comedy (b)

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Mayo

This headliner appeared before, but to a sparse audience, so Management’s giving him another chance… His joke relates to both Senn’s post (about alternatives), and to my recent post about using (1 – β)/α as a likelihood ratio--but for very different reasons. (I’ve explained at the bottom of this “(b) draft”.)

….If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s actually not Jay Leno who is standing up there at the mike, (especially as he’s no longer doing the Tonight Show) ….

It’s Sir Harold Jeffreys himself! And his (very famous) joke, I admit, is funny. So, since it’s Saturday night, let’s listen in on Sir Harold’s ~~howler~~ joke* in criticizing the use of p-values.

“Did you hear the one about significance testers rejecting H₀ because of outcomes H₀ didn’t predict?

‘What’s unusual about that?’ you ask?

What’s unusual is that they do it when these unpredicted outcomes haven’t even occurred!”

Much laughter.

[The actual quote from Jeffreys: Using p-values implies that “An hypothesis that may be true is rejected because it has failed to predict observable results that have not occurred. This seems a remarkable procedure.” (Jeffreys 1939, 316)]

I say it’s funny, so to see why I’ll strive to give it a generous interpretation. Continue reading →

Categories: Comedy, Discussion continued, Fisher, Jeffreys, P-values, Statistics, Stephen Senn

Stephen Senn: Fisher’s Alternative to the Alternative

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Mayo

As part of the week of recognizing R.A.Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962), I reblog Senn from 3 years ago.

‘Fisher’s alternative to the alternative’

By: Stephen Senn

The key letter here is Fisher’s reply of 6 October 1938 to Chester Bliss’s letter of 13 September. Bliss himself had reported an issue that had been raised with him by Snedecor on 6 September. Snedecor had pointed out that an analysis using inverse sine transformations of some data that Bliss had worked on gave a different result to an analysis of the original values. Bliss had defended his (transformed) analysis on the grounds that a) if a transformation always gave the same result as an analysis of the original data there would be no point and b) an analysis on inverse sines was a sort of weighted analysis of percentages with the transformation more appropriately reflecting the weight of information in each sample. Bliss wanted to know what Fisher thought of his reply.

Fisher replies with a ‘shorter catechism’ on transformations which ends as follows: Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, Statistics, Stephen Senn | Tags: power, Ronald Fisher, Savage, Stephen Senn

R. A. Fisher: How an Outsider Revolutionized Statistics (Aris Spanos)

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Mayo

In recognition of R.A. Fisher’s birthday….

‘R. A. Fisher: How an Outsider Revolutionized Statistics’

by Aris Spanos

Few statisticians will dispute that R. A. Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962) is the father of modern statistics; see Savage (1976), Rao (1992). Inspired by William Gosset’s (1908) paper on the Student’s t finite sampling distribution, he recast statistics into the modern model-based induction in a series of papers in the early 1920s. He put forward a theory of optimal estimation based on the method of maximum likelihood that has changed only marginally over the last century. His significance testing, spearheaded by the p-value, provided the basis for the Neyman-Pearson theory of optimal testing in the early 1930s. According to Hald (1998)

“Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science, without detailed study of his predecessors. When young he was ignorant not only of the Continental contributions but even of contemporary publications in English.” (p. 738)

What is not so well known is that Fisher was the ultimate outsider when he brought about this change of paradigms in statistical science. As an undergraduate, he studied mathematics at Cambridge, and then did graduate work in statistical mechanics and quantum theory. His meager knowledge of statistics came from his study of astronomy; see Box (1978). That, however did not stop him from publishing his first paper in statistics in 1912 (still an undergraduate) on “curve fitting”, questioning Karl Pearson’s method of moments and proposing a new method that was eventually to become the likelihood method in his 1921 paper. Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, phil/history of stat, Spanos, Statistics

R.A. Fisher: ‘Two New Properties of Mathematical Likelihood’: Just before breaking up (with N-P)

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Mayo

17 February 1890–29 July 1962

In recognition of R.A. Fisher’s birthday tomorrow, I will post several entries on him. I find this (1934) paper to be intriguing –immediately before the conflicts with Neyman and Pearson erupted. It represents essentially the last time he could take their work at face value, without the professional animosities that almost entirely caused, rather than being caused by, the apparent philosophical disagreements and name-calling everyone focuses on. Fisher links his tests and sufficiency, to the Neyman and Pearson lemma in terms of power. It’s as if we may see them as ending up in a very similar place (no pun intended) while starting from different origins. I quote just the most relevant portions…the full article is linked below. I’d blogged it earlier here. You may find some gems in it.

‘Two new Properties of Mathematical Likelihood’

by R.A. Fisher, F.R.S.

Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, 144: 285-307(1934)

If any group of samples can be found within the region of rejection whose probability of occurrence on the hypothesis H₁ is less than that of any other group of samples outside the region, but is not less on the hypothesis H₀, then the test can evidently be made more powerful by substituting the one group for the other. Continue reading →

Categories: Fisher, phil/history of stat, Statistics | Tags: Bayesianism, induction, Ronald Fisher, significance tests

A. Spanos: “Recurring controversies about P values and conﬁdence intervals revisited”

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Mayo

Aris Spanos
Wilson E. Schmidt Professor of Economics
Department of Economics, Virginia Tech

Recurring controversies about P values and conﬁdence intervals revisited*
Ecological Society of America (ESA) ECOLOGY
Forum—P Values and Model Selection (pp. 609-654)
Volume 95, Issue 3 (March 2014): pp. 645-651

INTRODUCTION

The use, abuse, interpretations and reinterpretations of the notion of a P value has been a hot topic of controversy since the 1950s in statistics and several applied ﬁelds, including psychology, sociology, ecology, medicine, and economics.

The initial controversy between Fisher’s signiﬁcance testing and the Neyman and Pearson (N-P; 1933) hypothesis testing concerned the extent to which the pre-data Type I error probability α can address the arbitrariness and potential abuse of Fisher’s post-data threshold for the P value. Continue reading →

Categories: CIs and tests, Error Statistics, Fisher, P-values, power, Statistics

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Fishing for fakes with Fisher

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Fraudian analysis?

The Statistics Wars & Their Casualties

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