Related papers: The Search for Certainty: a critical assessment
Classical statistics and Bayesian statistics refer to the frequentist and subjective theories of probability respectively. Von Mises and De Finetti, who authored those conceptualizations, provide interpretations of the probability that…
This book covers the history of probability up to Kolmogorov with essential additional coverage of statistics up to Fisher. Based on my work of ca. 50 years, it is the only suchlike book. Gorrochurn (2016) is similar but his study of events…
For many years, at least since McCarthy and Hayes (1969), writers have lamented, and attempted to compensate for, the alleged fact that we often do not have adequate statistical knowledge for governing the uncertainty of belief, for making…
We consider the problem of rational uncertainty about unproven mathematical statements, remarked on by G\"odel and others. Using Bayesian-inspired arguments we build a normative model of fair bets under deductive uncertainty which draws…
The book A Treatise on Probability was published by John Maynard Keynes in 1921. It contains a critical assessment of the foundations of probability and of the current statistical methodology. As a modern reader, we review here the aspects…
This note is an extended read of my read of Laplace's book Theorie Analytique des Probabilites, when considered from a Bayesian viewpoint but without historical nor comparative pretentions. A deeper analysis is provided in Dale (1999).
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
The role of probability appears unchallenged as the key measure of uncertainty, used among other things for practical induction in the empirical sciences. Yet, Popper was emphatic in his rejection of inductive probability and of the logical…
Rankings are central to decision-making in fields ranging from education to online platforms, yet classical deterministic methods such as the Borda count method or Copeland-type pairwise methods ignore uncertainty due to sampling noise or…
Mathematicians and philosophers have appealed to categoricity arguments in a surprisingly varied range of contexts. One familiar example calls on second-order categoricity in an attempt to show that the Continuum Hypothesis, despite its…
We study the problem of testing composite hypotheses versus composite alternatives, using a convex duality approach. In contrast to classical results obtained by Krafft and Witting (Z. Wahrsch. Verw. Gebiete 7 (1967) 289--302), where…
A simple proof of a key inequality required by the paper's analysis is presented. An introductory section discussing the paper's setup may be helpful to some readers. An alternative statistical analysis is suggested.
This document is a collection of comments that I wrote down while reading the first four chapters of the book "Discrete Groups, Expanding Graphs and Invariant Measures" by Alexander Lubotzky. Most of them are more detailed versions of…
In 2021, J.~Agler and J.~E. McCarthy proposed a two-step programme toward the celebrated Krzy\.z conjecture. The first step is to prove an entropy conjecture for polynomials whose zeros all lie on the unit circle; the second is to establish…
Since the seminal paper by Tversky and Kahneman, the conjunction fallacy has been the subject of multiple debates and become a fundamental challenge for cognitive theories in decision-making. In this article, we take a rather uncommon…
This article explains, and discusses the merits of, three approaches for analyzing the certainty with which statistical results can be extrapolated beyond the data gathered. Sometimes it may be possible to use more than one of these…
In spite of its title, the book mostly treats probability theory: the law of large numbers (regarded as a principle); formal definition of a random variable and law of distribution; the misnamed Cauchy distribution; functions now named…
(l) I have enough evidence to render the sentence S probable. (la) So, relative to what I know, it is rational of me to believe S. (2) Now that I have more evidence, S may no longer be probable. (2a) So now, relative to what I know, it is…
In eDiscovery, a party to a lawsuit or similar action must search through available information to identify those documents and files that are relevant to the suit. Search efforts tend to identify less than 100% of the relevant documents…
Analysis of credibility is a reverse-Bayes technique that has been proposed by Matthews (2001) to overcome some of the shortcomings of significance tests. A significant result is deemed credible if current knowledge about the effect size is…