Posts Tagged With: Spanos

Aris Spanos

I attended a lecture by Aris Spanos to his graduate econometrics class here at Va Tech last week[i]. This course, which Spanos teaches every fall, gives a superb illumination of the disparate pieces involved in statistical inference and modeling, and affords clear foundations for how they are linked together. His slides follow the intro section. Some examples with severity assessments are also included.

Frequentist Hypothesis Testing: A Coherent Approach

Aris Spanos

1    Inherent difficulties in learning statistical testing

Statistical testing is arguably  the  most  important, but  also the  most difficult  and  confusing chapter of statistical inference  for several  reasons, including  the following.

(i) The need to introduce numerous new notions, concepts and procedures before one can paint —  even in broad brushes —  a coherent picture  of hypothesis  testing.

(ii) The current textbook discussion of statistical testing is both highly confusing and confused.  There  are several sources of confusion.

• (a) Testing is conceptually one of the most sophisticated sub-fields of any scientific discipline.
• (b) Inadequate knowledge by textbook writers who often do not have  the  technical  skills to read  and  understand the  original  sources, and  have to rely on second hand  accounts  of previous  textbook writers that are  often  misleading  or just  outright erroneous.   In most  of these  textbooks hypothesis  testing  is poorly  explained  as  an  idiot’s guide to combining off-the-shelf formulae with statistical tables like the Normal, the Student’s t, the chi-square,  etc., where the underlying  statistical  model that gives rise to the testing procedure  is hidden  in the background.
• (c)  The  misleading  portrayal of Neyman-Pearson testing  as essentially  decision-theoretic in nature, when in fact the latter has much greater  affinity with the Bayesian rather than the frequentist inference.
• (d)  A deliberate attempt to distort and  cannibalize  frequentist testing by certain  Bayesian drumbeaters who revel in (unfairly)  maligning frequentist inference in their  attempts to motivate their  preferred view on statistical inference.

(iii) The  discussion of frequentist testing  is rather incomplete  in so far as it has been beleaguered by serious foundational problems since the 1930s. As a result, different applied fields have generated their own secondary  literatures attempting to address  these  problems,  but  often making  things  much  worse!  Indeed,  in some fields like psychology  it has reached the stage where one has to correct the ‘corrections’ of those chastising  the initial  correctors!

In an attempt to alleviate  problem  (i),  the discussion  that follows uses a sketchy historical  development of frequentist testing.  To ameliorate problem (ii), the discussion includes ‘red flag’ pointers (¥) designed to highlight important points that shed light on certain  erroneous  in- terpretations or misleading arguments.  The discussion will pay special attention to (iii), addressing  some of the key foundational problems.