Related papers: Statistics against irritations: a response to Dick…
When calculating citation indicators, whether it is the total number of received citations or the average citations per paper, we always face the same problem. Namely, that papers published in different years have varying citation…
The rating of items based on pairwise comparisons has been a topic of statistical investigation for many decades. Numerous approaches have been proposed. One of the best known is the Bradley-Terry model. This paper seeks to assemble and…
We present Russell's antinomy using three distinct deductive systems, which are then compared to deepen the logical deductions that lead to the contradiction. Some inferential paths are then presented, alternative to the commonly accepted…
Is more always better? We address this question in the context of bibliometric indices that aim to assess the scientific impact of individual researchers by counting their number of highly cited publications. We propose a simple model in…
We study the merging and the testing of opinions in the context of a prediction model. In the absence of incentive problems, opinions can be tested and rejected, regardless of whether or not data produces consensus among Bayesian agents. In…
Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic…
The paper shows that matching without replacement on propensity scores produces estimators that generally are inconsistent for the average treatment effect of the treated. To achieve consistency, practitioners must either assume that no…
This celebratory article contains a personal and idiosyncratic selection of a few open problems in discrete probability theory. These include certain well known questions concerning Lorentz scatterers and self-avoiding walks, and also some…
We study a setting where a group of agents, each receiving partially informative private signals, seek to collaboratively learn the true underlying state of the world (from a finite set of hypotheses) that generates their joint observation…
Building on research arguing for the possibility of conceptual and categorical knowledge acquisition through statistics contained in language, we evaluate predictive language models (LMs) -- informed solely by textual input -- on a…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
Consider the following story: A teacher announces to her students a test for the following week, such that the test will be ``surprising''. The students use this as the basis for a ``logical derivation'' and reach a contradiction, which…
This paper compares statistical experiments in discounted problems, ranging from the simplest ones where the state is fixed and the flow of information exogenous to more complex ones, where the decision-maker controls the flow of…
Neuroscientists frequently use a certain statistical reasoning to establish the existence of distinct neuronal processes in the brain. We show that this reasoning is flawed and that the large corresponding literature needs reconsideration.…
In their article 'The inconsistency of the h-index' Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Neck give three examples to demonstrate the inconsistency of the h-index. As will be explained, a little extension of their examples just illustrate the…
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…
Instead of testing for unanimous agreement, I propose learning how broad of a consensus favors one distribution over another (of earnings, productivity, asset returns, test scores, etc.). Specifically, given a sample from each of two…
Language models that are trained on the next-word prediction task have been shown to accurately model human behavior in word prediction and reading speed. In contrast with these findings, we present a scenario in which the performance of…
A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: {\it Alice in wonderland} and {\it Through a looking glass}. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a…
In randomized experiments, treatment and control groups should be roughly the same--balanced--in their distributions of pretreatment variables. But how nearly so? Can descriptive comparisons meaningfully be paired with significance tests?…