Related papers: Prior-free probabilistic prediction of future obse…
The inferential models (IM) framework provides prior-free, frequency-calibrated, posterior probabilistic inference. The key is the use of random sets to predict unobservable auxiliary variables connected to the observable data and unknown…
Posterior probabilistic statistical inference without priors is an important but so far elusive goal. Fisher's fiducial inference, Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions, and Bayesian inference with default priors are attempts to…
The inferential model (IM) framework provides valid prior-free probabilistic inference by focusing on predicting unobserved auxiliary variables. But, efficient IM-based inference can be challenging when the auxiliary variable is of higher…
The development of statistical methods for valid and efficient probabilistic inference without prior distributions has a long history. Fisher's fiducial inference is perhaps the most famous of these attempts. We argue that, despite its…
An inferential model (IM) is a model describing the construction of provably reliable, data-driven uncertainty quantification and inference about relevant unknowns. IMs and Fisher's fiducial argument have similar objectives, but a…
The use of standard statistical methods, such as maximum likelihood, is often justified based on their asymptotic properties. For suitably regular models, this theory is standard but, when the model is non-regular, e.g., the support depends…
The inferential model (IM) framework produces data-dependent, non-additive degrees of belief about the unknown parameter that are provably valid. The validity property guarantees, among other things, that inference procedures derived from…
When prior information is lacking, the go-to strategy for probabilistic inference is to combine a "default prior" and the likelihood via Bayes's theorem. Objective Bayes, (generalized) fiducial inference, etc. fall under this umbrella. This…
Existing frameworks for probabilistic inference assume the quantity of interest is the parameter of a posited statistical model. In machine learning applications, however, often there is no statistical model/parameter; the quantity of…
Prediction, where observed data is used to quantify uncertainty about a future observation, is a fundamental problem in statistics. Prediction sets with coverage probability guarantees are a common solution, but these do not provide…
Constructing valid inferential methods for constrained parameters in normal and Poisson distributions represents two fundamental and important problems in applied statistics, for which there is currently no unified framework for statistical…
The inferential model (IM) approach, like fiducial and its generalizations, depends on a representation of the data-generating process. Here, a particular variation on the IM construction is considered, one based on generalized…
Inferential models (IMs) offer prior-free, Bayesian-like posterior degrees of belief designed for statistical inference, which feature a frequentist-like calibration property that ensures reliability of said inferences. The catch is that…
In scientific applications, there often are several competing models that could be fit to the observed data, so quantification of the model uncertainty is of fundamental importance. In this paper, we develop an inferential model (IM)…
Motivated by parametric models for which the likelihood is analytically unavailable, numerically unstable, or prohibitively expensive to compute or optimize, we develop a prior- and likelihood-free framework for fully probabilistic…
As Basu (1977) writes, "Eliminating nuisance parameters from a model is universally recognized as a major problem of statistics," but after more than 50 years since Basu wrote these words, the two mainstream schools of thought in statistics…
Inferential models (IMs) are data-dependent, imprecise-probabilistic structures designed to quantify uncertainty about unknowns. As the name suggests, the focus has been on uncertainty quantification for inference and on its reliability…
Statistical inference on the mean of a Poisson distribution is a fundamentally important problem with modern applications in, e.g., particle physics. The discreteness of the Poisson distribution makes this problem surprisingly challenging,…
Inferential models (IMs) represent a novel possibilistic approach for achieving provably valid statistical inference. This paper introduces a general framework for fusing independent IMs in a "black-box" manner, requiring no knowledge of…
A crucial step in fitting a regression model to data is determining the model's structure, i.e., the subset of explanatory variables to be included. However, the uncertainty in this step is often overlooked due to a lack of satisfactory…