Talk:Foundations of statistics

Response to Gwernol redirect
This was mostly copied from Statistics, where it was considered generally useful, but inappropriate for that article. The text had been there for a long time, and was hardly POV. See the Discussion in the article for details. You should not make such changes, if you do not examine the context. TheSeven (talk) 11:28, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Outline ideas
Here's some things I think might go in this article:


 * Purpose and ultimate uses of statistics: summarising data, building reliable knowledge, making predictions or making decisions
 * Relationship of philosophies/schools/paradigms of statistics to probability interpretations
 * P values or confidence intervals or both?
 * Estimation (point and interval) vs statistical tests
 * Statistical schools/paradigms:
 * Frequentist
 * Fisher vs Neyman-Pearson interpretations of statistical tests
 * Bayesian
 * Subjective/full Bayes vs vague/non-informative priors
 * Pure "likelihoodism"
 * Pragmatism / eclecticism ("whatever works best / is easiest")
 * Differences in common practice between fields of application
 * Some due to differences in the subject matter, some only to different tradition?

Clearly there are separate articles on a lot of these, so I see this page as partly an overview and partly a place to compare and contrast different approaches (which to me seems more useful than having "alternatives" or "criticism" sections in lots of individual articles). Qwfp (talk) 11:33, 1 February 2008 (UTC)


 * This seems fine to me (a non-expert in the topic). One other thing that I would include, under likelihood, is that likelihood can arise directly from information theory, i.e. without directly using probability.  Perhaps too compare and contrast likelihood intervals and confidence intervals?    TheSeven (talk) 14:39, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

MathSciNet code
The following is copied from the AfD discussion, in case someone would like to follow-up on it. There is a lot of stuff written by major statisticians that seems like it fits well under this title. MathSciNet has a subject class, 'Foundations of statistics', code 62A, that was in use from 1973 to 1999. &hellip; Since 1999 the code seems to be 62A01, 'Foundational and philosophical topics.' EdJohnston TheSeven (talk) 15:13, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Enhancement beyond "stub"
The article now required some integration, opinion reduction, etc.172.249.254.111 (talk) 17:04, 3 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Nice work, 172.249.254.111. I think, improvements would still be useful in some places in order to make the article more accessible to non-statisticians. For example, the statement that in statistics likelihood "is reserved for probabilities that fail to meet the frequentist definition" is true, but can be misleading for those not already acquainted with likelihoods because prior probabilities are not likelihoods, likelihoods can have values that previously were frequentist probabilities, etc.--109.45.25.97 (talk) 17:00, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Formulation for significance testing
Significance testing is presented like this: "The significance test requires only one hypothesis. The test distinguish between truth of the hypothesis and insufficiency of evidence to disprove the hypothesis".

Can we really formulate like this, is it not rather: "The test distinguish between falsity of the hypothesis and insufficiency of evidence to disprove the hypothesis"? --Jeanp2 (talk) 14:01, 27 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Can't find the part of the article you refer to (perhaps it was removed?) but I think I agree with your claim. Said differently, a hypothesis test cannot demonstrate that any hypothesis is true or false, only whether the given evidence is sufficient to contradict it (with a desired confidence). Danielittlewood (talk) 10:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Misinterpretation of Gelman's paper
In the Modeling section, one of the bullet points is "Bayesian statistics focuses so tightly on the posterior probability that it ignores the fundamental comparison of observations and model" and cites Gelman and Shalizi (2012). I believe this is entirely a misinterpretation of the paper and should be deleted. Not only is the statement vague in what the writer meant by "fundamental comparison of observations and model," nowhere do Gelman and Shalizi say anything along those lines. Jourdy345 (talk) 16:17, 27 January 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree that this fragment seems dubious at best. The posterior probability is a model and not an observation, so it is hard to imagine what comparison could be done. I don't see any problem removing this line, but I suspect the entire surrounding section would benefit from substantial changes. Danielittlewood (talk) 10:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Khmer new year front angkor wat
Khmer new year front angkor wat MenRatha (talk) 03:10, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: ENGW3307 Adv Writing for the Sciences
— Assignment last updated by Yanzhi Hua (talk) 17:53, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Reads like an essay
I think there is much too much argumentation in the sections about hypothesis testing and inference. The majority of both of those sections would be better explained with a reference to books or papers that compare and contrast the approaches. This article should basically just say what the approaches are and summarise the current consensus. Detailed description of how Fisher and Neyman might have argued is a waste of the reader's time. Danielittlewood (talk) 10:04, 1 April 2024 (UTC)


 * 100% agreement here. The content is very confusing, goes into tiny nitpicks and I don't believe that any reader coming into this page without deep information about the underlying disputes comes out with more information.
 * I think this article requires a rewrite from the ground up, but I'm very confused as to how one would approach such a task. Guillaume P Dehaene (talk) 21:15, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Intro deserves more citations
I made substantial changes to the intro section to make the description more clear, but there are a number of claims made that I can't disprove directly and therefore didn't change. I think they sound either unclear or contentious & would benefit from further references.


 * "Others have achieved a pragmatic consensus for specific applications, such as the use of Bayesian methods in fitting complex ecological models." - I am not sure what pragmatic consensus means here. It may be that lots of fields have settled on Bayesian interpretation, but I think this would benefit from a broader picture if it is the case. I am suspicious of the truth of this because in most application Bayesian vs Frequentist interpretation makes no difference to the conclusion of the argument.
 * "Bandyopadhyay & Forster describe four statistical paradigms" - this sounds like the sort of thing any statistician could come up with off the top of their head. That isn't to say that the authors are wrong per se, but to me it sounds like there might be many similar but not identical classifications that other statisticians subscribe to.

Danielittlewood (talk) 10:19, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Frequentist vs Frequenter
Do frequentist and frequenter refer to the same thing? if so, should use of these words be standardised throughout the article? Hambulance (talk) 16:26, 3 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Both "frequent" and "frequenter" are misspellings which I have corrected. Guillaume P Dehaene (talk) 21:16, 29 June 2024 (UTC)