Related papers: Decision-making with possibilistic inferential mod…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 inferential model (IM) framework offers alternatives to the familiar probabilistic (e.g., Bayesian and fiducial) uncertainty quantification in statistical inference. Allowing this uncertainty quantification to be imprecise makes it…
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)…
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…
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…
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) 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…
Besides the classical motivation of fusing evidence from multiple sources, modern inferential procedures based on randomization, resampling, and data splitting often introduce analyst-generated multiplicity, where aggregating outputs across…
Inferential models (IMs) offer provably reliable, data-driven, possibilistic statistical inference. But despite the IM framework's theoretical and foundational advantages, efficient computation is a challenge. This paper presents a simple…
The inferential model (IM) framework offers an alternative to the classical probabilistic (e.g., Bayesian and fiducial) uncertainty quantification in statistical inference. A key distinction is that classical uncertainty quantification…
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…
Statisticians are largely focused on developing methods that perform well in a frequentist sense -- even the Bayesians. But the widely-publicized replication crisis suggests that these performance guarantees alone are not enough to instill…
Quantifying differences between probability distributions is fundamental to statistics and machine learning, primarily for comparing statistical uncertainty. In contrast, epistemic uncertainty -- due to incomplete knowledge -- requires…
Prediction of future observations is a fundamental problem in statistics. Here we present a general approach based on the recently developed inferential model (IM) framework. We employ an IM-based technique to marginalize out the unknown…