A Chess Scandal Revisited II – Kramnik Responds

Background: Former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik has argued that several win streaks of Hikaru Nakamura on chess.com are unusually long. Can we analyze these streaks to amass statistical evidence that something fishy is going on? In last week’s blogpost, I argued that the likelihood principle does not license the selection of a particular streak from a longer time series. It…

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A Chess Scandal Revisited – Why Nakamura is Right About Cherry-Picking

Recently I was attended to a paper by Maharaj, Polson, and Sokolov, in which they provided a statistical analysis of a chess cheating allegation. Their abstract: We provide a statistical analysis of the recent controversy between Vladimir Kramnik (ex chess world champion) and Hikaru Nakamura. Hikaru Nakamura is a chess prodigy and a five-time United States chess champion. Kramnik called…

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Sir Harold Jeffreys Graces the Cover of “De Psycholoog”

In a recent blogpost I introduced Marlijn Bouwman‘s painting of Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), godfather of Bayesian inference. The painting is available under a CC-BY license (and available from the artwork library on this site). This very painting now forms the cover of De Psycholoog, a Dutch magazine devoted to psychological science and insights relevant for psychological practice. Here is…

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The Hypothesis-Testing Philosophy of Harold Jeffreys Expressed As a 13-Word Slogan

[Featured image taken from a painting by Marlijn Bouwman under a CC-BY license (and available from the artwork library on this site)] In the 1930s, the polymath Harold Jeffreys developed a general Bayesian philosophy on hypothesis testing. Essentially, Jeffreys wanted to formalize the idea of scientific caution in statistical reasoning. Jeffreys argued that “variation must be taken as random until…

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Sir Harold Jeffreys and His Cat: A Painting and a Painful Anecdote

Recently I commissioned a painting of Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), whose groundbreaking Bayesian work remains a constant source of inspiration to me personally. The painting is now hanging in my office overlooking the chaos below, but I want to share it with the world as well. The painter is Marlijn Bouwman, and the painting is available under a CC-BY license…

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Geometric Intuition for a Surprising Result

My colleague Raoul Grasman and I recently posted the preprint “A discrepancy measure based on expected posterior probability“. In this preprint, we show that the expected posterior probability for a true model Hf equals the expected posterior probability for a true alternative model Hg. It is not immediately obvious why this should be the case. In Appendix A of the…

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Introducing the Diamond Open-Access “Journal of Robustness Reports”

This week marked the launch of a new diamond open-access journal: the Journal of Robustness Reports. This journal will publish short reanalyses of published empirical research findings. This is the abstract of the editorial:    The vast majority of empirical research articles report a single primary analysis outcome that is the result of a single analysis plan, executed by a…

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Ockham’s Razor with Polyhedral Dice: Jeffreys Already Did it

Inspired by an article on Ockham’s razor by Johnjoe McFadden, a previous post showed how a simple set of polyhedral dice can clarify the basic idea underlying Bayes factors. In the photo below, you see a family of four polyhedral dice: the D3, the D6 (this is the common six-sided die), the D12, and the D60.   The Setup You may assume…

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