Honorary Mention

“Wonderful examples, but let’s not close our eyes,”  is David J. Hand’s apt title for his discussion of the recent special issue (Feb 2014) of Statistical Science called “Big Bayes Stories” (edited by Sharon McGrayne, Kerrie Mengersen and Christian Robert.) For your Saturday night/ weekend reading, here are excerpts from Hand, another discussant (Welsh), scattered remarks of mine, along with links to papers and background. I begin with David Hand:

 [The papers in this collection] give examples of problems which are well-suited to being tackled using such methods, but one must not lose sight of the merits of having multiple different strategies and tools in one’s inferential armory.(Hand [1])_

…. But I have to ask, is the emphasis on ‘Bayesian’ necessary? That is, do we need further demonstrations aimed at promoting the merits of Bayesian methods? … The examples in this special issue were selected, firstly by the authors, who decided what to write about, and then, secondly, by the editors, in deciding the extent to which the articles conformed to their desiderata of being Bayesian success stories: that they ‘present actual data processing stories where a non-Bayesian solution would have failed or produced sub-optimal results.’ In a way I think this is unfortunate. I am certainly convinced of the power of Bayesian inference for tackling many problems, but the generality and power of the method is not really demonstrated by a collection specifically selected on the grounds that this approach works and others fail. To take just one example, choosing problems which would be difficult to attack using the Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing strategy would not be a convincing demonstration of a weakness of that approach if those problems lay outside the class that that approach was designed to attack.

Hand goes on to make a philosophical assumption that might well be questioned by Bayesians: Continue reading →