The Galton board or quincunx is a fascinating device that provides a compelling demonstration of one the main laws of statistics. In the device, balls are dropped from above onto a series of pegs that are organized in rows of increasing width. Whenever a ball hits a particular peg, it can drop either to the right or to the left,…

We thank Alexander Ly for constructive comments on an earlier draft of this post. Bayes’ rule tells us how to learn from experience, that is, by updating our knowledge about the world using relative predictive performance: hypotheses that predicted the data relatively well receive a boost in credibility, whereas hypotheses that predicted the data relatively poorly suffer a decline (e.g.,…

Abstract When data analysts operate within different statistical frameworks (e.g., frequentist versus Bayesian, emphasis on estimation versus emphasis on testing), how does this impact the qualitative conclusions that are drawn for real data? To study this question empirically we selected from the literature two simple scenarios -involving a comparison of two proportions and a Pearson correlation- and asked four teams…

In a recent article for Computational Brain & Behavior, we discussed several limitations of Bayesian leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO) for model selection. Our contribution attracted three thought-provoking commentaries by (1) Vehtari, Simpson, Yao, and Gelman, (2) Navarro, and (3) Shiffrin and Chandramouli. We just submitted a rejoinder in which we address each of the commentaries and identify several additional limitations of…

Recently the 59th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New Orleans played host to an interesting series of talks on how statistical methods should interact with the practice of science. Some speakers discussed exploratory model building, suggesting that this activity may not benefit much, if any at all, from preregistration. On the Twitterverse, reports of these talks provoked an…

Recently I came across an article by Morton Ann Gernsbacher, entitled “Writing empirical articles: Transparency, reproducibility, clarity, and memorability” (preprint). The author covers a lot of ground and makes a series of good points. Also, as one would hope and expect, the article itself is a joy to read. Here is a fragment from the section “Recommendations for Clarity” —…

Today I am presenting a lecture for the “Masterclass in Bayesian Statistics” that takes place from October 22 to October 26th 2018, at CIRM (Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques) in Marseille, France. The slides of my talk,“Bayesian Inference Without Tears” are here. Unfortunately the slides cannot convey the JASP demo work, but the presentations are taped so I hope to…

The frequentist food and drug administration (FDA) has circulated a draft version of new guidelines for adaptive designs, with the explicit purpose of soliciting comments. The draft is titled “Adaptive designs for clinical trials of drugs and biologics: Guidance for industry” and you can find it here. As summarized on the FDA webpage, this draft document        …