Related papers: Can Bayes Factors "Prove" the Null Hypothesis?
Statistical analysis is often used to evaluate the evidence for or against scientific hypotheses, and various statistics (e.g., p-values, likelihood ratios, Bayes factors) are interpreted as measures of evidence strength. Here I consider…
Good large sample performance is typically a minimum requirement of any model selection criterion. This article focuses on the consistency property of the Bayes factor, a commonly used model comparison tool, which has experienced a recent…
One formulation of forensic identification of source problems is to determine the source of trace evidence, for instance, glass fragments found on a suspect for a crime. The current state of the science is to compute a Bayes factor (BF)…
A common task in physics and astronomy is studying which of the competing hypotheses the data prefer. This is usually done by computing the Bayes factor between the two hypotheses, and either interpreting it in terms of the posterior odds…
This paper is concerned with the well known Jeffreys-Lindley paradox. In a Bayesian set up, the so-called paradox arises when a point null hypothesis is tested and an objective prior is sought for the alternative hypothesis. In particular,…
Testing the equality of two proportions is a common procedure in science, especially in medicine and public health. In these domains it is crucial to be able to quantify evidence for the absence of a treatment effect. Bayesian hypothesis…
Bayesian inference --- although becoming popular in physics and chemistry --- is hampered up to now by the vagueness of its notion of prior probability. Some of its supporters argue that this vagueness is the unavoidable consequence of the…
To assess whether there is some signal in a big database, aggregate tests for the global null hypothesis of no effect are routinely applied in practice before more specialized analysis is carried out. Although a plethora of aggregate tests…
Much of science is (rightly or wrongly) driven by hypothesis testing. Even in situations where the hypothesis testing paradigm is correct, the common practice of basing inferences solely on p-values has been under intense criticism for over…
Random effects are a flexible addition to statistical models to capture structural heterogeneity in the data, such as spatial dependencies, individual differences, temporal dependencies, or non-linear effects. Testing for the presence (or…
The Full Bayesian Significance Test (FBST) for precise hypotheses was presented by Pereira and Stern (1999) as a Bayesian alternative instead of the traditional significance test based on p-value. The FBST uses the evidence in favor of the…
Hypothesis testing of structure in covariance matrices is of significant importance, but faces great challenges in high-dimensional settings. Although consistent frequentist one-sample covariance tests have been proposed, there is a lack of…
A recurring debate in the philosophy of statistics concerns what, exactly, should count as a measure of evidence for or against a given hypothesis. P-values, likelihood ratios, and Bayes factors all have their defenders. In this paper we…
In science, the most widespread statistical quantities are perhaps $p$-values. A typical advice is to reject the null hypothesis $H_0$ if the corresponding p-value is sufficiently small (usually smaller than 0.05). Many criticisms regarding…
The choice of the summary statistics used in Bayesian inference and in particular in ABC algorithms has bearings on the validation of the resulting inference. Those statistics are nonetheless customarily used in ABC algorithms without…
When researchers carry out a null hypothesis significance test, it is tempting to assume that a statistically significant result lowers Prob(H0), the probability of the null hypothesis being true. Technically, such a statement is…
Uniformly most powerful tests are statistical hypothesis tests that provide the greatest power against a fixed null hypothesis among all tests of a given size. In this article, the notion of uniformly most powerful tests is extended to the…
We point out that the Neyman-Pearson lemma applies to Bayes factors if we consider expected type-1 and type-2 error rates. That is, the Bayes factor is the test statistic that maximises the expected power for a fixed expected type-1 error…
In Bayesian statistics, one's prior beliefs about underlying model parameters are revised with the information content of observed data from which, using Bayes' rule, a posterior belief is obtained. A non-trivial example taken from the…
In practical situations, most experimental designs often yield unbalanced data which have different numbers of observations per unit because of cost constraints, or missing data, etc. In this paper, we consider the Bayesian approach to…