Today is R.A. Fisher’s birthday. I’ll post some different Fisherian items this week in honor of it. This paper comes just before the conflicts with Neyman and Pearson erupted. Fisher links his tests and sufficiency, to the Neyman and Pearson lemma in terms of power. It’s as if we may see them as ending up […]
Some recent criticisms of statistical tests of significance have breathed brand new life into some very old howlers, many of which have been discussed on this blog. One variant that returns to the scene every decade I think (for 50+ years?), takes a “disagreement on numbers” to show a problem with significance tests even from a “frequentist” perspective. Since it’s […]
At least as apt today as 3 years ago…HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Memory Lane with new comments in blue. In an earlier post I alleged that frequentist hypotheses tests often serve as whipping boys, by which I meant “scapegoats”, for the well-known misuses, abuses, and flagrant misinterpretations of tests (both simple Fisherian significance tests and Neyman-Pearson tests, although in different ways)—as […]
Is it possible, today, to have a fair-minded engagement with debates over statistical foundations? I’m not sure, but I know it is becoming of pressing importance to try. Increasingly, people are getting serious about methodological reforms—some are quite welcome, others are quite radical. Too rarely do the reformers bring out the philosophical presuppositions of the criticisms and proposed […]
Note on an Article by Sir Ronald Fisher By Jerzy Neyman (1956) Summary (1) FISHER’S allegation that, contrary to some passages in the introduction and on the cover of the book by Wald, this book does not really deal with experimental design is unfounded. In actual fact, the book is permeated with problems of experimentation. […]
“Is the Philosophy of Probabilism an Obstacle to Statistical Fraud Busting?” was my presentation at the 2014 Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science):“Revisiting the Foundations of Statistics in the Era of Big Data: Scaling Up to Meet the Challenge.” As often happens, I never put these slides into a stand alone paper. But I have […]
In recognition of R.A. Fisher’s birthday tomorrow, I will post several entries on him. I find this (1934) paper to be intriguing –immediately before the conflicts with Neyman and Pearson erupted. It represents essentially the last time he could take their work at face value, without the professional animosities that almost entirely caused, rather than being caused by, the apparent […]
Saturday Night Brainstorming: The TFSI on NHST–part reblog from here and here, with a substantial 2015 update! Each year leaders of the movement to “reform” statistical methodology in psychology, social science, and other areas of applied statistics get together around this time for a brainstorming session. They review the latest from the Task Force on Statistical […]
July 4, 2014 was the two year anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery. As the world was celebrating the “5 sigma!” announcement, and we were reading about the statistical aspects of this major accomplishment, I was aghast to be emailed a letter, purportedly instigated by Bayesian Dennis Lindley, through Tony O’Hagan (to the ISBA). Lindley, according […]
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 […]
