Related papers: Use of the likelihood for measuring the skill of p…
This paper introduces a qualitative measure of ambiguity and analyses its relationship with other measures of uncertainty. Probability measures relative likelihoods, while ambiguity measures vagueness surrounding those judgments. Ambiguity…
We highlight the different uses of the word 'likelihood' that have arisen in statistics and meteorology, and make the recommendation that one of these uses should be dropped to prevent confusion and misunderstanding.
People vary in their ability to make accurate predictions about the future. Prior studies have shown that some individuals can predict the outcome of future events with consistently better accuracy. This leads to a natural question: what…
We give elementary examples within a framework for studying decisions under uncertainty where probabilities are only roughly known. The framework, in gambling terms, is that the size of a bet is proportional to the gambler's perceived…
Probabilistic forecasts must sum to unity and cannot express ``I don't know.'' Possibility theory relaxes this constraint: a subnormal distribution explicitly measures how much of the plausibility budget remains unassigned, ignorance signal…
Test log-likelihood is commonly used to compare different models of the same data or different approximate inference algorithms for fitting the same probabilistic model. We present simple examples demonstrating how comparisons based on test…
I explore the use of sets of probability measures as a representation of uncertainty.
The Brier score is frequently used by meteorologists to measure the skill of binary probabilistic forecasts. We show, however, that in simple idealised cases it gives counterintuitive results. We advocate the use of an alternative measure…
The spread of ensemble weather forecasts contains information about the spread of possible future weather scenarios. But how much information does it contain, and how useful is that information in predicting the probabilities of future…
The established language for statistical testing --- significance levels, power, and p-values --- is overly complicated and deceptively conclusive. Even teachers of statistics and scientists who use statistics misinterpret the results of…
This paper offers a commentary on the use of notions of statistical significance in choice modelling. We review the reasons for uncertainty in parameter estimates, provide a precise discussion on the computation of measures of uncertainty…
The concept of typicality refers to properties holding for the "overwhelming majority" of cases and is a fundamental idea of the qualitative approach to dynamical problems. We argue that measure-theoretical typicality would be the adequate…
The likelihood ratio is a crucial quantity for statistical inference in science that enables hypothesis testing, construction of confidence intervals, reweighting of distributions, and more. Many modern scientific applications, however,…
An informal and elementary introduction to probability scoring and forecast verification and improvement, slightly extended from Significance 22:3(2025)16, which might be useful for less mathematical readers as a prologue to the classic…
In our paper published earlier we discussed forecasts of earthquake focal mechanism and ways to test the forecast efficiency. Several verification methods were proposed, but they were based on ad-hoc, empirical assumptions, thus their…
Nonprobability (convenience) samples are increasingly sought to stabilize estimations for one or more population variables of interest that are performed using a randomized survey (reference) sample by increasing the effective sample size.…
Nonprobability (convenience) samples are increasingly sought to reduce the estimation variance for one or more population variables of interest that are estimated using a randomized survey (reference) sample by increasing the effective…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
We examine a new approach to modeling uncertainty based on plausibility measures, where a plausibility measure just associates with an event its plausibility, an element is some partially ordered set. This approach is easily seen to…
The value of the likelihood is occasionally used by high energy physicists as a statistic to measure goodness-of-fit in unbinned maximum likelihood fits. Simple examples are presented that illustrate why this (seemingly intuitive) method…