Related papers: Statistics against irritations: a response to Dick…
The scientific community discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them. Such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. While a world where authors cite…
Prediction is a complex notion, and different predictors (such as people, computer programs, and probabilistic theories) can pursue very different goals. In this paper I will review some popular kinds of prediction and argue that the theory…
Researchers have long tried to relate personality types to teaching and learning styles. It is believed that the psychological theory behind the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) can help university teachers to accept variety in teaching…
Stance detection, which aims to determine whether an individual is for or against a target concept, promises to uncover public opinion from large streams of social media data. Yet even human annotation of social media content does not…
In this paper we propose several variants to perform the independence test between two random elements based on recurrence rates. We will show how to calculate the test statistic in each one of these cases. From simulations we obtain that…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…
This paper presents the results of an experiment to decide the question of authenticity of the supposedly spurious Rhesus - a attic tragedy sometimes credited to Euripides. The experiment involves use of statistics in order to test whether…
In this paper we quantify the consistency of word usage in written texts represented by complex networks, where words were taken as nodes, by measuring the degree of preservation of the node neighborhood.} Words were considered highly…
The speech-to-song illusion is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby a spoken sentence sounds increasingly more musical as it is repeated. Despite decades of research, a complete formal account of this transformation is still lacking,…
We consider the problem of estimating the probability of an observed string drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. The key feature of our study is that the length of the observed string is assumed to be of the same order as the size of…
This paper discusses different needs and approaches to establishing ``causation'' that are relevant in legal cases involving statistical input based on epidemiological (or more generally observational or population-based) information. We…
We consider a general class of super-additive scores measuring the similarity of two independent sequences of $n$ i.i.d. letters from a finite alphabet. Our object of interest is the mean score by letter $l_n$. By the subadditivity $l_n$ is…
We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic narration…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
When sociologists and other social scientist ask whether the return to college differs by race and gender, they face a choice between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry. Traditional interaction models follow deductive logic: the…
(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…
Bibliometric indicators, citation counts and/or download counts are increasingly being used to inform personnel decisions such as hiring or promotions. These statistics are very often misused. Here we provide a guide to the factors which…
That science and other domains are now largely data-driven means virtually unlimited opportunities for statisticians. With great power comes responsibility, so it's imperative that statisticians ensure that the methods being developing to…
In Nature Human Behaviour 3/2019, an article was published entitled "Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition" dealing with (besides other things) the question of the authorship of the Old English poem Beowulf.…
Shafer (2021) offers a betting perspective on statistical testing which may be useful for foundational debates, given that disputes over such testing continue to be intense. To be helpful for researchers, however, this perspective will need…