Related papers: Constructing confidence intervals for constrained …

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…

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…

We review the methods of constructing confidence intervals that account for a priori information about one-sided constraints on the parameter being estimated. We show that the so-called method of sensitivity limit yields a correct solution…

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) 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 development of statistical methods for valid and efficient probabilistic inference without prior distributions has a long history. Fisher's fiducial inference is perhaps the most famous of these attempts. We argue that, despite its…

Statistical inference on the mean of a Poisson distribution is a fundamentally important problem with modern applications in, e.g., particle physics. The discreteness of the Poisson distribution makes this problem surprisingly challenging,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

As Basu (1977) writes, "Eliminating nuisance parameters from a model is universally recognized as a major problem of statistics," but after more than 50 years since Basu wrote these words, the two mainstream schools of thought in statistics…

Especially when facing reliability data with limited information (e.g., a small number of failures), there are strong motivations for using Bayesian inference methods. These include the option to use information from physics-of-failure or…

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 'standard' confidence interval for a Poisson parameter is only one of a number of estimation intervals based on the chi-square distribution that may be used in the estimation of the mean or mean rate for a Poisson model. Other…

We present a method of constructing statistical intervals that obtain a natural middle ground between Bayesian and frequentist statistical intervals, previously unexplored in literature: To a p% Bayesian credible interval we should assign a…

Motivated by parametric models for which the likelihood is analytically unavailable, numerically unstable, or prohibitively expensive to compute or optimize, we develop a prior- and likelihood-free framework for fully probabilistic…