Related papers: The Language of Betting as a Strategy for Statisti…
Mathematics is a limited component of solutions to real-world problems, as it expresses only what is expected to be true if all our assumptions are correct, including implicit assumptions that are omnipresent and often incorrect.…
Null hypothesis significance testing remains popular despite decades of concern about misuse and misinterpretation. We believe that much of the problem is due to language: significance testing has little to do with other meanings of the…
In many fields of research null hypothesis significance tests and p values are the accepted way of assessing the degree of certainty with which research results can be extrapolated beyond the sample studied. However, there are very serious…
Verbal probability phrases are often used to express estimated risk. In this study, focus was on the numerical interpretation of 29 Dutch probability and frequency phrases, including several complementary phrases to test (a)symmetry in…
Although there are many ideas for the formulations of statistical hypothesis testing, we consider that the likelihood ratio test is the most reasonable and orthodox. However, it is not handy, and thus, it is not usual in elementary books.…
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…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Researchers often misinterpret and misrepresent statistical outputs. This abuse has led to a large literature on modification or replacement of testing thresholds and $P$-values with confidence intervals, Bayes factors, and other devices.…
A logic is defined that allows to express information about statistical probabilities and about degrees of belief in specific propositions. By interpreting the two types of probabilities in one common probability space, the semantics given…
Language models (LM) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks; however, numerical reasoning is an area in which they frequently struggle. An important but rarely evaluated form of reasoning is understanding probability…
Language models (LMs) estimate a probability distribution over strings in a natural language; these distributions are crucial for computing perplexity and surprisal in linguistics research. While we are usually concerned with measuring…
There are at least two ways to interpret numerical degrees of belief in terms of betting: (1) you can offer to bet at the odds defined by the degrees of belief, or (2) you can judge that a strategy for taking advantage of such betting…
The study of associations and their causal explanations is a central research activity whose methodology varies tremendously across fields. Even within specialized subfields, comparisons across textbooks and journals reveals that the basics…
A number of writers(Joseph Halpern and Fahiem Bacchus among them) have offered semantics for formal languages in which inferences concerning probabilities can be made. Our concern is different. This paper provides a formalization of…
After some general remarks about the interrelation between philosophical and statistical thinking, the discussion centres largely on significance tests. These are defined as the calculation of $p$-values rather than as formal procedures for…
This paper investigates the possibility of performing automated reasoning in probabilistic logic when probabilities are expressed by means of linguistic quantifiers. Each linguistic term is expressed as a prescribed interval of proportions.…
It is quite common in modern research, for a researcher to test many hypotheses. The statistical (frequentist) hypothesis testing framework, does not scale with the number of hypotheses in the sense that naively performing many hypothesis…
Frequentist inference typically is described in terms of hypothetical repeated sampling but there are advantages to an interpretation that uses a single random sample. Contemporary examples are given that indicate probabilities for random…
How should social scientists understand and communicate the uncertainty of statistically estimated causal effects? I propose we utilize the posterior distribution of a causal effect and present the probability of the effect being greater…
The logical and practical difficulties associated with research interpretation using P values and null hypothesis significance testing have been extensively documented. This paper describes an alternative, likelihood-based approach to…