Four score years ago (!) we held the conference “Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science: Where Do (Should) They meet?” at the London School of Economics, Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, CPNSS, where I’m visiting professor [1] Many of the discussions on this blog grew out of contributions from the conference, and conversations […]
Aris Spanos Wilson E. Schmidt Professor of Economics Department of Economics, Virginia Tech Recurring controversies about P values and confidence intervals revisited* Ecological Society of America (ESA) ECOLOGY Forum—P Values and Model Selection (pp. 609-654) Volume 95, Issue 3 (March 2014): pp. 645-651 INTRODUCTION The use, abuse, interpretations and reinterpretations of the notion of a P value […]
“The medical press must become irrelevant to publication of clinical trials.” So said Stephen Senn at a recent meeting of the Medical Journalists’ Association with the title: “Is the current system of publishing clinical trials fit for purpose?” Senn has thrown a few stones in the direction of medical journals in guest posts on this […]
Blood Simple? The complicated and controversial world of bioequivalence by Stephen Senn* Those not familiar with drug development might suppose that showing that a new pharmaceutical formulation (say a generic drug) is equivalent to a formulation that has a licence (say a brand name drug) ought to be simple. However, it can often turn out to […]
Today is Allan Birnbaum’s Birthday. Birnbaum’s (1962) classic “On the Foundations of Statistical Inference” is in Breakthroughs in Statistics (volume I 1993). I’ve a hunch that Birnbaum would have liked my rejoinder to discussants of my forthcoming paper (Statistical Science): Bjornstad, Dawid, Evans, Fraser, Hannig, and Martin and Liu. I hadn’t realized until recently that all of this is up […]
Here are the slides from my presentation (May 17) at the Scientism workshop in NYC. (They’re sketchy since we were trying for 25-30 minutes.) Below them are some mini notes on some of the talks. Now for my informal notes. Here’s a link to the Speaker abstracts;the presentations may now be found at the conference site here. Comments, questions, and corrections […]
At the start of our seminar, I said that “on weekends this spring (in connection with Phil 6334, but not limited to seminar participants) I will post some of my ‘deconstructions‘ of articles”. I began with Andrew Gelman‘s note “Ethics and the statistical use of prior information”[i], but never posted my deconstruction of it. So since it’s Saturday night, and […]
If there’s somethin’ strange in your neighborhood. Who ya gonna call?(Fisherian Fraudbusters!)* *[adapted from R. Parker's "Ghostbusters"] When you need to warrant serious accusations of bad statistics, if not fraud, where do scientists turn? Answer: To the frequentist error statistical reasoning and to p-value scrutiny, first articulated by R.A. Fisher[i].The latest accusations of big time fraud in social […]
Aris Spanos’ overview of error statistical responses to familiar criticisms of statistical tests. Related reading is Mayo and Spanos (2011) Filed under: Error Statistics, frequentist/Bayesian, Phil6334, reforming the reformers, statistical test...
“What ever happened to Bayesian foundations?” was one of the final topics of our seminar (Mayo/SpanosPhil6334). In the past 15 years or so, not only have (some? most?) Bayesians come to accept violations of the Likelihood Principle, they have also tended to disown Dutch Book arguments, and the very idea of inductive inference as updating beliefs by […]
