The philosophical tag has no wiki summary.
-3
votes
0answers
34 views
Will data mining be useful for me? [closed]
I'm part of a bioinformatics facility and wish to characterize the current state of the field of bioinformatics in the hope of creating intelligence that will:
identify trends and direction in the ...
4
votes
2answers
139 views
Meaning of hypothesis test for “μ = 25”; isn't it impossible?
I'm working through a stats textbook and have a question of the form:
You will perform a significance test of $H_0: μ=25$ based on an SRS of $n=25$. Assume $σ=5$.
I'm stuck on the 'equals' part ...
2
votes
1answer
61 views
What principled arguments are made with data?
Consider the frequentist argument: "I will believe A since not-A makes the data improbable".
Consider the Bayesian argument: "I will believe A since given my beliefs on A and the data generating ...
3
votes
2answers
141 views
Are there any other interpretations besides bayesian and frequentist?
I am aware of the frequentist and bayesian interpretations of statistics. I prefer Bayesian because I think it's closer to how people think, and because we in practice often can't rerun a trial a ...
4
votes
2answers
96 views
Should false discovery be controlled at the data acquisition level, or should this be at the data interpretation level?
Should false discovery be controlled at the data acquisition level, or should this be at the data interpretation level?
I have an experiment in which microarrays were used to quantify the expression ...
11
votes
4answers
541 views
Why is statistics useful when many things that matter are one shot things?
I don't know if it's just me, but I am very skeptical of statistics in general. I can understand it in dice games, poker games, etc. Very small, simple, mostly self-contained repeated games are ...
1
vote
2answers
105 views
Must there be “an effect to be mediated” in mediational analysis (i.e., must IVs & DVs be correlated)?
Baron and Kenny outlined several steps to aid in determining if a mediational analysis is appropriate to test a particular hypothesis. The very first step was "Show that the initial [independent] ...
14
votes
4answers
340 views
Statistical intuition/data sense
I am a second-year undergraduate student, studying Math, and I've been talking to one of my professors a good amount about the difference between mathematical ability and statistical ability. One of ...
10
votes
5answers
465 views
Confidence interval and probability - where is the error in this statement?
If someone makes a statement like below:
"Overall, nonsmokers exposed to environmental smoke had a relative
risk of coronary heart disease of 1.25 (95 percent confidence
interval, 1.17 to ...
1
vote
0answers
161 views
Inductive vs deductive Inference
I am curious to know exactly, what are the (possible) differences between inductive and deductive statistical inferences in applied statistics.
Suggestions for some good resources to learn their ...
6
votes
5answers
531 views
If you use a point estimate that maximizes $P(x | \theta)$, what does that say about your philosophy? (frequentist or Bayesian or something else?)
If somebody said
"That method uses the MLE the point estimate for the parameter which maximizes $\mathrm{P}(x|\theta)$, therefore it is frequentist; and further it is not Bayesian."
would you ...
22
votes
3answers
917 views
Entropy-based refutation of Shalizi's Bayesian backward arrow of time paradox?
In this paper, the talented researcher Cosma Shalizi argues that to fully accept a subjective Bayesian view, one must also accept an unphysical result that the arrow of time (given by the flow of ...
17
votes
3answers
610 views
What is the fiducial argument and why has it not been accepted?
One of the late contributions of R.A. Fisher was fiducial intervals and fiducial principled arguments. This approach however is nowhere near as popular as frequentist or Bayesian principled arguments. ...
0
votes
2answers
267 views
The Principle of Indifference in Overlapping Sets [closed]
EDIT: This closed question has been split into:
a question about relevant literature
Literature Relevant to Estimating Set-Overlap With Insufficient Information?
a more open-ended chat
...
29
votes
6answers
2k views
Where did the frequentist-Bayesian debate go?
The world of statistics was divided between frequentists and Bayesians. These days it seems everyone does a bit of both. How can this be? If the different approaches are suitable for different ...
36
votes
3answers
2k views
How are we defining 'reproducible research'?
This has come up in a few questions now, and I've been wondering about something. Has the field as a whole moved toward "reproducibility" focusing on the availability of the original data, and the ...
12
votes
7answers
1k views
Which one is the null hypothesis? Conflict between science theory, logic and statistics?
I am having difficulties understanding the underlying logic in setting the null hypothesis. In this answer the obviously generally accepted proposition is stated that the null hypothesis is the ...
12
votes
2answers
257 views
Statistical landscape
Has anyone written a brief survey of the various approaches to statistics? To a first approximation you have frequentist and Bayesian statistics. But when you look closer you also have other ...
41
votes
8answers
9k views
Is normality testing 'essentially useless'?
A former colleague once argued to me as follows: "we usually apply normality tests to the results of processes that, under the null, generate random variables that are only asymptotically or nearly ...
