the joy of stats [book review]

David Spiegelhalter‘s latest book, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, has made it to Nature Book Review main entry this week. Under the title “the joy of stats”,  written by Evelyn Lamb, a freelance math and science writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. (I noticed that the book made it to Amazon #1 bestseller, albeit in the Craps category!, which I am unsure is completely adequate!, especially since the book is not yet for sale on the US branch of Amazon!, and further Amazon #1 in the Probability and Statistics category in the UK.) I have not read the book yet and here are a few excerpts from the review, quoted verbatim:

“The book is part of a trend in statistics education towards emphasizing conceptual understanding rather than computational fluency. Statistics software can now perform a battery of tests and crunch any measure from large data sets in the blink of an eye. Thus, being able to compute the standard deviation of a sample the long way is seen as less essential than understanding how to design and interpret scientific studies with a rigorous eye.”

“…a main takeaway from the book is a sense of circumspection about our confidence in what is known. As Spiegelhalter writes, the point of statistical science is to ease us through the stages of extrapolation from a controlled study to an understanding of the real world, `and finally, with due humility, be able to say what we can and cannot learn from data’. That humility can be lacking when statistics are used in debates about contentious issues such as the costs and benefits of cancer screening.

Validity and the foundations of statistical inference

Natesh pointed out to me this recent arXival with a somewhat grandiose abstract:

In this paper, we argue that the primary goal of the foundations of statistics is to provide data analysts with a set of guiding principles that are guaranteed to lead to valid statistical inference. This leads to two new questions: “what is valid statistical inference?” and “do existing methods achieve this?” Towards answering these questions, this paper makes three contributions. First, we express statistical inference as a process of converting observations into degrees of belief, and we give a clear mathematical definition of what it means for statistical inference to be valid. Second, we evaluate existing approaches Bayesian and frequentist approaches relative to this definition and conclude that, in general, these fail to provide valid statistical inference. This motivates a new way of thinking, and our third contribution is a demonstration that the inferential model framework meets the proposed criteria for valid and prior-free statistical inference, thereby solving perhaps the most important unsolved problem in statistics.

Since solving the “most important unsolved problem in statistics” sounds worth pursuing, I went and checked the paper‘s contents.

“To us, the primary goal of the foundations of statistics is to provide a set of guiding principles that, if followed, will guarantee validity of the resulting inference. Our motivation for writing this paper is to be clear about what is meant by valid inference and to provide the necessary principles to help data analysts achieve validity.”

Which can be interpreted in so many ways that it is somewhat meaningless…

“…if real subjective prior information is available, we recommend using it. However, there is an expanding collection of work (e.g., machine learning, etc) that takes the perspective that no real prior information is available. Even a large part of the literature claiming to be Bayesian has abandoned the interpretation of the prior as a serious part of the model, opting for “default” prior that “works.” Our choice to omit a prior from the model is not for the (misleading) purpose of being “objective”—subjectivity is necessary—but, rather, for the purpose of exploring what can be done in cases where a fully satisfactory prior is not available, to see what improvements can be made over the status quo.”

This is a pretty traditional criticism of the Bayesian approach, namely that if a “true” prior is provided (by whom?) then it is optimal to use it. But this amounts to turn the prior into another piece of the sampling distribution and is not in my opinion a Bayesian argument! Most of the criticisms in the paper are directed at objective Bayes approaches, with the surprising conclusion that, because there exist cases where no matching prior is available, “the objective Bayesian approach [cannot] be considered as a general framework for scientific inference.” (p.9)

Another section argues that a Bayesian modelling cannot describe a state of total ignorance. This is formally correct, which is why there is no such thing as a non-informative or the non-informative prior, as often discussed here, but is this truly relevant, in that the inference problem contains one way or another information about the parameter, for instance through a loss function or a pseudo-likelihood.

“This is a desirable property that most existing methods lack.”

The proposal central to the paper thesis is to replace posterior probabilities by belief functions b(.|X), called statistical inference, that are interpreted as measures of evidence about subsets A of the parameter space. If not necessarily as probabilities. This is not very novel, witness the works of Dempster, Shafer and subsequent researchers. And not very much used outside Bayesian and fiducial statistics because of the mostly impossible task of defining a function over all subsets of the parameter space. Because of the subjectivity of such “beliefs”, they will be “valid” only if they are well-calibrated in the sense of b(A|X) being sub-uniform, that is, more concentrated near zero than a uniform variate (i.e., small) under the alternative, i.e. when θ is not in A. At this stage, since this is a mix of a minimax and proper coverage condition, my interest started to quickly wane… Especially because the sub-uniformity condition is highly demanding, if leading to controls over the Type I error and the frequentist coverage. As often, I wonder at the meaning of a calibration property obtained over all realisations of the random variable and all values of the parameter. So for me stability is neither “desirable” nor “essential”. Overall, I have increasing difficulties in perceiving proper coverage as a relevant property. Which has no stronger or weaker meaning that the coverage derived from a Bayesian construction.

“…frequentism does not provide any guidance for selecting a particular rule or procedure.”

I agree with this assessment, which means that there is no such thing as frequentist inference, but rather a philosophy for assessing procedures. That the Gleser-Hwang paradox invalidates this philosophy sounds a bit excessive, however. Especially when the bounded nature of Bayesian credible intervals is also analysed as a failure. A more relevant criticism is the lack of directives for picking procedures.

“…we are the first to recognize that the belief function’s properties are necessary in order for the inferential output to satisfy the required validity property”

The construction of the “inferential model” proposed by the authors offers similarities withn fiducial inference, in that it builds upon the representation of the observable X as X=a(θ,U). With further constraints on the function a() to ensure the validity condition holds… An interesting point is that the functional connection X=a(θ,U) means that the nature of U changes once X is observed, albeit in a delicate manner outside a Bayesian framework. When illustrated on the Gleser-Hwang paradox, the resolution proceeds from an arbitrary choice of a one-dimensional summary, though. (As I am reading the paper, I realise it builds on other and earlier papers by the authors, papers that I cannot read for lack of time. I must have listned to a talk by one of the authors last year at JSM as this rings a bell. Somewhat.) In conclusion of a quick Sunday afternoon read, I am not convinced by the arguments in the paper and even less by the impression of a remaining arbitrariness in setting the resulting procedure.