Related papers: Fisher's underworld and the behavioral-statistical…
Statistical inferential results generally come with a measure of reliability for decision-making purposes. For a policy implementer, the value of implementing published policy research depends critically upon this reliability. For a policy…
This special volume of Statistical Sciences presents some innovative, if not provocative, ideas in the area of reliability, or perhaps more appropriately named, integrated system assessment. In this age of exponential growth in science,…
Reliability (survival analysis, to biostatisticians) is a key ingredient for mak- ing decisions that mitigate the risk of failure. The other key ingredient is utility. A decision theoretic framework harnesses the two, but to invoke this…
Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Scientific knowledge expands by observing the world, hypothesizing some theories about it, and testing them against collected data. When those theories take the form of statistical models, statistical analyses are involved in the process of…
Statistical inference as a formal scientific method to covert experience to knowledge has proven to be elusively difficult. While frequentist and Bayesian methodologies have been accepted in the contemporary era as two dominant schools of…
We examine the role of trustworthiness and trust in statistical inference, arguing that it is the extent of trustworthiness in inferential statistical tools which enables trust in the conclusions. Certain tools, such as the p-value and…
Fisher's fiducial argument is widely viewed as a failed version of Neyman's theory of confidence limits. But Fisher's goal -- Bayesian-like probabilistic uncertainty quantification without priors -- was more ambitious than Neyman's, and…
This paper tackles the challenge of detecting unreliable behavior in regression algorithms, which may arise from intrinsic variability (e.g., aleatoric uncertainty) or modeling errors (e.g., model uncertainty). First, we formally introduce…
Statistics has made tremendous advances since the times of Fisher, Neyman, Jeffreys, and others, but the fundamental and practically relevant questions about probability and inference that puzzled our founding fathers remain unanswered. To…
The role of statisticians in society is to provide tools, techniques, and guidance with regards to how much to trust data. This role is increasingly more important with more data and more misinformation than ever before. The American…
How can we draw trustworthy scientific conclusions? One criterion is that a study can be replicated by independent teams. While replication is critically important, it is arguably insufficient. If a study is biased for some reason and other…
Reproducibility is imperative for any scientific discovery. More often than not, modern scientific findings rely on statistical analysis of high-dimensional data. At a minimum, reproducibility manifests itself in stability of statistical…
The aim of this paper is to firmly establish subjective fiducial inference as a rival to the more conventional schools of statistical inference, and to show that Fisher's intuition concerning the importance of the fiducial argument was…
In this paper, we propose standard statistical tools as a solution to commonly highlighted problems in the explainability literature. Indeed, leveraging statistical estimators allows for a proper definition of explanations, enabling…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
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.…
We formalize the idea of probability distributions that lead to reliable predictions about some, but not all aspects of a domain. The resulting notion of `safety' provides a fresh perspective on foundational issues in statistics, providing…
We discuss recent work for causal inference and predictive robustness in a unifying way. The key idea relies on a notion of probabilistic invariance or stability: it opens up new insights for formulating causality as a certain risk…