Blog

The default Bayes factor hypothesis test compares the predictive performance of two rival models, the point-null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis . In the case of the -test, a popular choice for the prior distribution is a Cauchy centered on zero with scale parameter 0.707 (for informed alternatives see Gronau et al., in press). One of the problems with such…

In September 2018, the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a draft version of the industry guidance on “Adaptive Designs for Clinical Trials of Drugs and Biologics”. In an earlier blog post we provided some comments from a Bayesian perspective that we also submitted as feedback to the FDA. Two months ago, the FDA released the final version of…

Despite dying at a young age, Frank Ramsey has had a profound impact on the field of probability and inference. In his book Making decisions, Dennis Lindley lionizes Ramsey to the point of hyperbole:         “The basic ideas discussed in this book were essentially discovered by Frank Ramsey, who worked in Cambridge in the 1920s. To my…

In the previous post I discussed the famous de Finettti (1974) preface, containing the iconic statement “PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST”. As mentioned in that post, many statisticians and philosophers of science believe that, together with Frank Ramsey, de Finetti was the first real subjectivist. Fellow subjectivist Dennis Lindley, for instance, always expressed a fawning admiration for de Finetti, calling him…

Together with Frank Ramsey, the Italian “radical probabilist” Bruno de Finetti is widely considered to be the main progenitor and promoter of the idea that probability is inherently subjective. According to this view, all we can do is specify our prior beliefs and then ensure that they remain coherent, that is, free from internal inconsistencies. And the only way to…

The Center of Reproducibility Science (CRS) in Zurich opens the new year by organizing a workshop “Design and Analysis of Replication Studies”. The goal of this workshop is to have “a thorough methodological discussion regarding the design and the analysis of replication studies including specialists from different fields such as clinical research, psychology, economics and others.” I quite look forward…

R code for the reported analyses is available at https://osf.io/sfam7/. My wife Nataschja teaches labor law at Utrecht University. For one of her papers she needed to evaluate the claim that “over the past 35 years, the number of applications processed by the AAC (Advice and Arbitration Committee) has decreased”. After collecting the relevant data Nataschja asked me whether I…