Related papers: From Observations to Hypotheses: Probabilistic Rea…
When statisticians quarrel about hypothesis testing, the debate usually focus on which method is the correct one. The fundamental question of whether we should test hypothesis at all tends to be forgotten. This lack of debate has its roots…
The classical conception of falsification presents scientific theories as entities that are decisively refuted when their predictions fail. This picture has long been challenged by both philosophical analysis and scientific practice, yet…
Criticisms of so called `subjective probability' come on the one hand from those who maintain that probability in physics has only a frequentistic interpretation, and, on the other, from those who tend to `objectivise' Bayesian theory,…
A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…
Statistics has moved beyond the frequentist-Bayesian controversies of the past. Where does this leave our ability to interpret results? I suggest that a philosophy compatible with statistical practice, labeled here statistical pragmatism,…
We argue here about the relevance and the ultimate unity of the Bayesian approach in a neutral and agnostic manner. Our main theme is that Bayesian data analysis is an effective tool for handling complex models, as proven by the increasing…
Comprehensible explanations of probabilistic reasoning are a prerequisite for wider acceptance of Bayesian methods in expert systems and decision support systems. A study of human reasoning under uncertainty suggests two different…
In the last months, due to the emergency of Covid-19, questions related to the fact of belonging or not to a particular class of individuals (`infected or not infected'), after being tagged as `positive' or `negative' by a test, have never…
This paper considers the problem of making statistical inferences about a parameter when a narrow interval centred at a given value of the parameter is considered special, which is interpreted as meaning that there is a substantial degree…
In many applications of the probabilistic method, one looks to study phenomena that occur ``with high probability''. More recently however, in an attempt to understand some of the most fundamental problems in combinatorics, researchers have…
The asymptotically optimal hypothesis testing problem with the general sources as the null and alternative hypotheses is studied under exponential-type error constraints on the first kind of error probability. Our fundamental philosophy in…
Modern statisticians are often presented with hundreds or thousands of hypothesis testing problems to evaluate at the same time, generated from new scientific technologies such as microarrays, medical and satellite imaging devices, or flow…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
A critical step in data analysis for many different types of experiments is the identification of features with theoretically defined shapes in N-dimensional datasets; examples of this process include finding peaks in multi-dimensional…
Self-normalized processes are basic to many probabilistic and statistical studies. They arise naturally in the the study of stochastic integrals, martingale inequalities and limit theorems, likelihood-based methods in hypothesis testing and…
We consider the problem of hypotheses testing with the basic simple hypothesis: observed sequence of points corresponds to stationary Poisson process with known intensity against a composite one-sided parametric alternative that this is a…
Two different approaches to dealing with probabilistic knowledge are examined -models and inductive inference. Examples of the first are: influence diagrams [1], Bayesian networks [2], log-linear models [3, 4]. Examples of the second are:…
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…
A central challenge in statistical inference is the presence of confounding variables that may distort observed associations between treatment and outcome. Conventional "causal" methods, grounded in assumptions such as ignorability, exclude…
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…