Related papers: Evidence and Elimination: A Bayesian Interpretatio…

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…

The role of probability appears unchallenged as the key measure of uncertainty, used among other things for practical induction in the empirical sciences. Yet, Popper was emphatic in his rejection of inductive probability and of the logical…

It is mostly agreed that Popper's criterion of falsifiability fails to provide a useful demarcation between science and pseudo-science, because ad-hoc assumptions are always able to save any theory that conflicts with the empirical data…

Scientific claims gain credibility by replicability, especially if replication under different circumstances and varying designs yields equivalent results. Aggregating results over multiple studies is, however, not straightforward, and when…

A substantial school in the philosophy of science identifies Bayesian inference with inductive inference and even rationality as such, and seems to be strengthened by the rise and practical success of Bayesian statistics. We argue that the…

The problem of induction has persisted since Hume exposed the logical gap between repeated observation and universal inference. Traditional attempts to resolve it have oscillated between two extremes: the probabilistic optimism of Laplace…

This paper is concerned with the question of when a theory is refutable with certainty on the basis of sequence of primitive observations. Beginning with the simple definition of falsifiability as the ability to be refuted by some finite…

In this paper we consider the issue of paradigm evaluation by applying Bayes' theorem along the following nested hierarchy of progressively more complex structures: i) parameter estimation (within a model), ii) model selection and…

Bayesian hypothesis testing is re-examined from the perspective of an a priori assessment of the test statistic distribution under the alternative. By assessing the distribution of an observable test statistic, rather than prior parameter…

This article examines the overlooked risk of false negative errors arising from eliminations in forensic firearm comparisons. While recent reforms in forensic science have focused on reducing false positives, eliminations--often based on…

We revisit Popper's falsifiability criterion. A tester hires a potential expert to produce a theory, offering payments contingent on the observed performance of the theory. In our model, instead of knowing the true data-generating process,…

Assessment of replicability is critical to ensure the quality and rigor of scientific research. In this paper, we discuss inference and modeling principles for replicability assessment. Targeting distinct application scenarios, we propose…

We study the identifiability of parameters and falsifiability of predictions under the process of model expansion in a Bayesian setting. Identifiability is represented by the closeness of the posterior to the prior distribution and…

Prediction is the making of statements, usually probabilistic, about future events based on current information. Retrodiction is the making of statements about past events based on current information. We present the foundations of quantum…

In this paper, we are concerned with attributing meaning to the results of a Bayesian analysis for a problem which is sufficiently complex that we are unable to assert a precise correspondence between the expert probabilistic judgements of…

Hypothesis elimination is a special case of Bayesian updating, where each piece of new data rules out a set of prior hypotheses. We describe how to use Grover's algorithm to perform hypothesis elimination for a class of probability…

Here we argue that the notion of falsifiability, a key concept in defining a valid scientific theory, can be quantified using Bayesian Model Selection, which is a standard tool in modern statistics. This relates falsifiability to the…

Analogy has received attention as a form of inductive reasoning in the empirical sciences. However, its role in pure mathematics has received less consideration. This paper provides an account of how an analogy with a more familiar…

There are things we know, things we know we don't know, and then there are things we don't know we don't know. In this paper we address the latter two issues in a Bayesian framework, introducing the notion of doubt to quantify the degree of…

Fine-tuning in physics and cosmology is often used as evidence that a theory is incomplete. For example, the parameters of the standard model of particle physics are "unnaturally" small (in various technical senses), which has driven much…