Posts Tagged With: statistical Generating Mechanism

A Statistical Model as a Chance Mechanism

Aris Spanos

Jerzy Neyman (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981), was a Polish/American statistician[i] who spent most of his professional career at the University of California, Berkeley. Neyman is best known in statistics for his pioneering contributions in framing the Neyman-Pearson (N-P) optimal theory of hypothesis testing and his theory of Confidence Intervals.

One of Neyman’s most remarkable, but least recognized, achievements was his adapting of Fisher’s (1922) notion of a statistical model to render it pertinent for  non-random samples. Fisher’s original parametric statistical model M_θ(x) was based on the idea of ‘a hypothetical infinite population’, chosen so as to ensure that the observed data x₀:=(x₁,x₂,…,x_n) can be viewed as a ‘truly representative sample’ from that ‘population’:

“The postulate of randomness thus resolves itself into the question, Of what population is this a random sample? (ibid., p. 313), underscoring that: the adequacy of our choice may be tested a posteriori.’’ (p. 314)

In cases where data x₀ come from sample surveys or it can be viewed as a typical realization of a random sample X:=(X₁,X₂,…,X_n), i.e. Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) random variables, the ‘population’ metaphor can be helpful in adding some intuitive appeal to the inductive dimension of statistical inference, because one can imagine using a subset of a population (the sample) to draw inferences pertaining to the whole population.

This ‘infinite population’ metaphor, however, is of limited value in most applied disciplines relying on observational data. To see how inept this metaphor is consider the question: what is the hypothetical ‘population’ when modeling the gyrations of stock market prices? More generally, what is observed in such cases is a certain on-going process and not a fixed population from which we can select a representative sample. For that very reason, most economists in the 1930s considered Fisher’s statistical modeling irrelevant for economic data! Continue reading →