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It has recently been shown that the marginalization paradox (MP) can be resolved by interpreting improper inferences as probability limits. The key to the resolution is that probability limits need not satisfy the formal Bayes' law, which…
Informally, "Information Inconsistency" is the property that has been observed in many Bayesian hypothesis testing and model selection procedures whereby the Bayesian conclusion does not become definitive when the data seems to become…
Inference from limited data requires a notion of measure on parameter space, most explicit in the Bayesian framework as a prior. Here we demonstrate that Jeffreys prior, the best-known uninformative choice, introduces enormous bias when…
Bayes' Theorem imposes inevitable limitations on the accuracy of screening tests by tying the test's predictive value to the disease prevalence. The aforementioned limitation is independent of the adequacy and make-up of the test and thus…
Models for analyzing multivariate data sets with missing values require strong, often unassessable, assumptions. The most common of these is that the mechanism that created the missing data is ignorable - a twofold assumption dependent on…
The concept of updating a probability distribution in the light of new evidence lies at the heart of statistics and machine learning. Pearl's and Jeffrey's rule are two natural update mechanisms which lead to different outcomes, yet the…
Every network scientist knows that preferential attachment combines with growth to produce networks with power-law in-degree distributions. How, then, is it possible for the network of American Physical Society journal collection citations…
Generalized friendship paradoxes occur when, on average, our friends have more of some attribute than us. These paradoxes are relevant to many aspects of human interaction, notably in social science and epidemiology. Here, we derive new…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
Statistical learning using imprecise probabilities is gaining more attention because it presents an alternative strategy for reducing irreplicable findings by freeing the user from the task of making up unwarranted high-resolution…
Since its original formulation, Jensen's inequality has played a fundamental role across mathematics, statistics, and machine learning, with its probabilistic version highlighting the nonnegativity of the so-called Jensen's gap, i.e., the…
The Lutz-Kelker correction is intended to give an unbiased estimate for stellar parallaxes and magnitudes, but it is shown explicitly that it does not. This paradox results from the application of an argument about sample statistics to the…
We investigate the relation between frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Namely, we find the "frequentist" Bayes prior \pi_{f}(\lambda,x_{obs}) = -\frac{\int_{-\infty}^{x_{obs}}\frac{\partial f(x,\lambda)}{\partial…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
Note: Published now as a chapter in "Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice" (Springer Nature, editor B. Sriraman, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19071-2_105-1). The application of mathematical probability theory…
The replication crisis has prompted many to call for statistical reform within the psychological sciences. Here we examine issues within Frequentist statistics that may have led to the replication crisis, and we examine the…
The local false discovery rate (lfdr) of Efron et al. (2001) enjoys major conceptual and decision-theoretic advantages over the false discovery rate (FDR) as an error criterion in multiple testing, but is only well-defined in Bayesian…
Bayesian parameter inference depends on a choice of prior probability distribution for the parameters in question. The prior which makes the posterior distribution maximally sensitive to data is called the Jeffreys prior, and it is…
For the universal hypothesis testing problem, where the goal is to decide between the known null hypothesis distribution and some other unknown distribution, Hoeffding proposed a universal test in the nineteen sixties. Hoeffding's universal…
Correlated proportions arise in longitudinal (panel) studies. A typical example is the ``opinion swing'' problem: ``Has the proportion of people favoring a politician changed after his recent speech to the nation on TV?''. Since the same…