This post is a teaser for Velidi, P., Wei, Z., Kalaria, S. N., Liu, Y., Laumont, C. M., Nelson, B. H., & Nathoo, F. S. (2025). Generalized Jeffreys’s approximate objective Bayes factor: Model-selection consistency, finite-sample accuracy, and statistical evidence in 71,126 clinical trial findings. ArXiv preprint:2510.10358. Abstract “Concerns about the misuse and misinterpretation of p-values and statistical significance have motivated…
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A few months ago I submitted a project on open-science for the so-called OSCARS Open Call. Today I received a three-sentence evaluation. The first sentence of the feedback started as follows: “The idea is brilliant and relevant” (and from there it did not go downhill much). Scores on the various dimensions deemed “brilliant and relevant” were 2, 2, 2, 1.5,…
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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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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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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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[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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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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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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