about the strong likelihood principle

Deborah Mayo arXived a Statistical Science paper a few days ago, along with discussions by Jan Bjørnstad, Phil Dawid, Don Fraser, Michael Evans, Jan Hanning, R. Martin and C. Liu. I am very glad that this discussion paper came out and that it came out in Statistical Science, although I am rather surprised to find […]

the likelihood principle (sequel)

As mentioned in my review of Paradoxes in Scientific Inference I was a bit confused by this presentation of the likelihood principle and this led me to ponder for a week or so whether or not there was an issue with Birnbaum’s proof (or, much more likely, with my vision of it!). After reading again […]

That the likelihood principle does not hold…

Coming to Section III in Chapter Seven of Error and Inference, written by Deborah Mayo, I discovered that she considers that the likelihood principle does not hold (at least as a logical consequence of the combination of the sufficiency and of the conditionality principles), thus that  Allan Birnbaum was wrong…. As well as the dozens […]

Bayesian inference with no likelihood

This week I made a quick trip to Warwick for the defence (or viva) of the PhD thesis of Jack Jewson, containing novel perspectives on constructing Bayesian inference without likelihood or without complete trust in said likelihood. The thesis aimed at constructing minimum divergence posteriors in an M-open perspective and built a rather coherent framework […]

asymptotics of synthetic likelihood

David Nott, Chris Drovandi and Robert Kohn just arXived a paper on a comparison between ABC and synthetic likelihood, which is both interesting and timely given that synthetic likelihood seems to be lacking behind in terms of theoretical evaluation. I am however as puzzled by the results therein as I was by the earlier paper […]