Likelihood Principle

Midnight With Birnbaum: Happy New Year 2023!

Posted on December 31, 2022 by Mayo

For the last three years, unlike the previous 10 years that I’ve been blogging, it was not feasible to actually revisit that spot in the road, looking to get into a strange-looking taxi, to head to “Midnight With Birnbaum”. But this year I will, and I’m about to leave at 10pm. (The pic on the left is the only blurry image I have of the club I’m taken to.) My book Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (CUP, 2018) doesn’t include the argument from my article in Statistical Science (“On the Birnbaum Argument for the Strong Likelihood Principle”), but you can read it at that link along with commentaries by A. P. David, Michael Evans, Martin and Liu, D. A. S. Fraser, Jan Hannig, and Jan Bjornstad. David Cox, who very sadly did in January 2022, is the one who encouraged me to write and publish it. (The first David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Prize will be awarded at the JSM 2023.) The (Strong) Likelihood Principle (LP or SLP) remains at the heart of many of the criticisms of Neyman-Pearson (N-P) statistics and of error statistics in general. Continue reading →

Categories: Likelihood Principle, optional stopping, P-value | Leave a comment

“A [very informal] Conversation Between Sir David Cox & D.G. Mayo”

Posted on January 29, 2022 by Mayo

In June 2011, Sir David Cox agreed to a very informal ‘interview’ on the topics of the 2010 workshop that I co-ran at the London School of Economics (CPNSS), Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science, where he was a speaker. Soon after I began taping, Cox stopped me in order to show me how to do a proper interview. He proceeded to ask me questions, beginning with:

COX: Deborah, in some fields foundations do not seem very important, but we both think foundations of statistical inference are important; why do you think that is?

MAYO: I think because they ask about fundamental questions of evidence, inference, and probability. I don’t think that foundations of different fields are all alike; because in statistics we’re so intimately connected to the scientific interest in learning about the world, we invariably cross into philosophical questions about empirical knowledge and inductive inference.

Continue reading →

Categories: Birnbaum, Likelihood Principle, Sir David Cox, StatSci meets PhilSci | Tags: D. G. Mayo, Sir David Cox

Brian Dennis: Journal Editors Be Warned: Statistics Won’t Be Contained (Guest Post)

Posted on January 15, 2022 by Mayo

Brian Dennis
Professor Emeritus
Dept Fish and Wildlife Sciences,
Dept Mathematics and Statistical Science
University of Idaho

Journal Editors Be Warned: Statistics Won’t Be Contained

I heartily second Professor Mayo’s call, in a recent issue of Conservation Biology, for science journals to tread lightly on prescribing statistical methods (Mayo 2021). Such prescriptions are not likely to be constructive; the issues involved are too vast.

The science of ecology has long relied on innovative statistical thinking. Fisher himself, inventor of P values and a considerable portion of other statistical methods used by generations of ecologists, helped ecologists quantify patterns of biodiversity (Fisher et al. 1943) and understand how genetics and evolution were connected (Fisher 1930). G. E. Hutchinson, the “founder of modern ecology” (and my professional grandfather), early on helped build the tradition of heavy consumption of mathematics and statistics in ecological research (Slack 2010). Continue reading →

Categories: ecology, editors, Likelihood Principle, Royall | Tags: ecology