## The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom [book review]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 10, 2017 by xi'an

I remember quite well attending the ASA Presidential address of Stephen Stigler at JSM 2014, Boston, on the seven pillars of statistical wisdom. In connection with T.E. Lawrence’s 1926 book. Itself in connection with Proverbs IX:1. Unfortunately wrongly translated as seven pillars rather than seven sages.

As pointed out in the Acknowledgements section, the book came prior to the address by several years. I found it immensely enjoyable, first for putting the field in a (historical and) coherent perspective through those seven pillars, second for exposing new facts and curios about the history of statistics, third because of a literary style one would wish to see more often in scholarly texts and of a most pleasant design (and the list of reasons could go on for quite a while, one being the several references to Jorge Luis Borges!). But the main reason is to highlight the unified nature of Statistics and the reasons why it does not constitute a subfield of either Mathematics or Computer Science. In these days where centrifugal forces threaten to split the field into seven or more disciplines, the message is welcome and urgent.

Here are Stephen’s pillars (some comments being already there in the post I wrote after the address):

1. aggregation, which leads to gain information by throwing away information, aka the sufficiency principle. One (of several) remarkable story in this section is the attempt by Francis Galton, never lacking in imagination, to visualise the average man or woman by superimposing the pictures of several people of a given group. In 1870!
2. information accumulating at the √n rate, aka precision of statistical estimates, aka CLT confidence [quoting  de Moivre at the core of this discovery]. Another nice story is Newton’s wardenship of the English Mint, with musing about [his] potential exploiting this concentration to cheat the Mint and remain undetected!
3. likelihood as the right calibration of the amount of information brought by a dataset [including Bayes’ essay as an answer to Hume and Laplace’s tests] and by Fisher in possible the most impressive single-handed advance in our field;
4. intercomparison [i.e. scaling procedures from variability within the data, sample variation], from Student’s [a.k.a., Gosset‘s] t-test, better understood and advertised by Fisher than by the author, and eventually leading to the bootstrap;
5. regression [linked with Darwin’s evolution of species, albeit paradoxically, as Darwin claimed to have faith in nothing but the irrelevant Rule of Three, a challenging consequence of this theory being an unobserved increase in trait variability across generations] exposed by Darwin’s cousin Galton [with a detailed and exhilarating entry on the quincunx!] as conditional expectation, hence as a true Bayesian tool, the Bayesian approach being more specifically addressed in (on?) this pillar;
6. design of experiments [re-enters Fisher, with his revolutionary vision of changing all factors in Latin square designs], with an fascinating insert on the 18th Century French Loterie,  which by 1811, i.e., during the Napoleonic wars, provided 4% of the national budget!;
7. residuals which again relate to Darwin, Laplace, but also Yule’s first multiple regression (in 1899), Fisher’s introduction of parametric models, and Pearson’s χ² test. Plus Nightingale’s diagrams that never cease to impress me.

The conclusion of the book revisits the seven pillars to ascertain the nature and potential need for an eight pillar.  It is somewhat pessimistic, at least my reading of it was, as it cannot (and presumably does not want to) produce any direction about this new pillar and hence about the capacity of the field of statistics to handle in-coming challenges and competition. With some amount of exaggeration (!) I do hope the analogy of the seven pillars that raises in me the image of the beautiful ruins of a Greek temple atop a Sicilian hill, in the setting sun, with little known about its original purpose, remains a mere analogy and does not extend to predict the future of the field! By its very nature, this wonderful book is about foundations of Statistics and therefore much more set in the past and on past advances than on the present, but those foundations need to move, grow, and be nurtured if the field is not to become a field of ruins, a methodology of the past!

## The Richard Price Society

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , on November 26, 2015 by xi'an

As an item of news coming to me via ISBA News, I learned of the Richard Price Society and of its endeavour to lobby for the Welsh government to purchase Richard Price‘s birthplace as an historical landmark. As discussed in a previous post, Price contributed so much to Bayes’ paper that one may wonder who made the major contribution. While I am not very much inclined in turning old buildings into museums, feel free to contact the Richard Price Society to support this action! Or to sign the petition there. Which I cannot resist but  reproduce in Welsh:

#### Datblygwch Fferm Tynton yn Ganolfan Ymwelwyr a Gwybodaeth

​Rydym yn galw ar Lywodraeth Cymru i gydnabod cyfraniad pwysig Dr Richard Price nid yn unig i’r Oes Oleuedig yn y ddeunawfed ganrif, ond hefyd i’r broses o greu’r byd modern yr ydym yn byw ynddo heddiw, a datblygu ei fan geni a chartref ei blentyndod yn ganolfan wybodaeth i ymwelwyr lle gall pobl o bob cenedl ac oed ddarganfod sut mae ei gyfraniadau sylweddol i ddiwinyddiaeth, mathemateg ac athroniaeth wedi dylanwadu ar y byd modern.

## carrer de Thomas Bayes [formulas magistrales]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , on June 11, 2015 by xi'an

## eliminating an important obstacle to creative thinking: statistics…

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2015 by xi'an

“We hope and anticipate that banning the NHSTP will have the effect of increasing the quality of submitted manuscripts by liberating authors from the stultified structure of NHSTP thinking thereby eliminating an important obstacle to creative thinking.”

About a month ago, David Trafimow and Michael Marks, the current editors of the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology published an editorial banning all null hypothesis significance testing procedures (acronym-ed into the ugly NHSTP which sounds like a particularly nasty venereal disease!) from papers published by the journal. My first reaction was “Great! This will bring more substance to the papers by preventing significance fishing and undisclosed multiple testing! Power to the statisticians!” However, after reading the said editorial, I realised it was inspired by a nihilistic anti-statistical stance, backed by an apparent lack of understanding of the nature of statistical inference, rather than a call for saner and safer statistical practice. The editors most clearly state that inferential statistical procedures are no longer needed to publish in the journal, only “strong descriptive statistics”. Maybe to keep in tune with the “Basic” in the name of the journal!

“In the NHSTP, the problem is in traversing the distance from the probability of the finding, given the null hypothesis, to the probability of the null hypothesis, given the finding. Regarding confidence intervals, the problem is that, for example, a 95% confidence interval does not indicate that the parameter of interest has a 95% probability of being within the interval.”

The above quote could be a motivation for a Bayesian approach to the testing problem, a revolutionary stance for journal editors!, but it only illustrate that the editors wish for a procedure that would eliminate the uncertainty inherent to statistical inference, i.e., to decision making under… erm, uncertainty: “The state of the art remains uncertain.” To fail to separate significance from certainty is fairly appalling from an epistemological perspective and should be a case for impeachment, were any such thing to exist for a journal board. This means the editors cannot distinguish data from parameter and model from reality! Even more fundamentally, to bar statistical procedures from being used in a scientific study is nothing short of reactionary. While encouraging the inclusion of data is a step forward, restricting the validation or in-validation of hypotheses to gazing at descriptive statistics is many steps backward and does completely jeopardize the academic reputation of the journal, which editorial may end up being the last quoted paper. Is deconstruction now reaching psychology journals?! To quote from a critic of this approach, “Thus, the general weaknesses of the deconstructive enterprise become self-justifying. With such an approach I am indeed not sympathetic.” (Searle, 1983).

“The usual problem with Bayesian procedures is that they depend on some sort of Laplacian assumption to generate numbers where none exist (…) With respect to Bayesian procedures, we reserve the right to make case-by-case judgments, and thus Bayesian procedures are neither required nor banned from BASP.”

The section of Bayesian approaches is trying to be sympathetic to the Bayesian paradigm but again reflects upon the poor understanding of the authors. By “Laplacian assumption”, they mean Laplace´s Principle of Indifference, i.e., the use of uniform priors, which is not seriously considered as a sound principle since the mid-1930’s. Except maybe in recent papers of Trafimow. I also love the notion of “generat[ing] numbers when none exist”, as if the prior distribution had to be grounded in some physical reality! Although it is meaningless, it has some poetic value… (Plus, bringing Popper and Fisher to the rescue sounds like shooting Bayes himself in the foot.)  At least, the fact that the editors will consider Bayesian papers in a case-by-case basis indicate they may engage in a subjective Bayesian analysis of each paper rather than using an automated p-value against the 100% rejection bound!

[Note: this entry was suggested by Alexandra Schmidt, current ISBA President, towards an incoming column on this decision of Basic and Applied Social Psychology for the ISBA Bulletin.]

## interesting mis-quote

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2014 by xi'an

At a recent conference on Big Data, one speaker mentioned this quote from Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google:

“All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.”

quote that I found rather shocking, esp. when considering the amount of modelling behind Google tools. And coming from someone citing Kernel Methods for Pattern Analysis by Shawe-Taylor and Christianini as one of his favourite books and Bayesian Data Analysis as another one… Or displaying Bayes [or his alleged portrait] and Turing in his book cover. So I went searching on the Web for more information about this surprising quote. And found the explanation, as given by Peter Norvig himself:

“To set the record straight: That’s a silly statement, I didn’t say it, and I disagree with it.”

Which means that weird quotes have a high probability of being misquotes. And used by others to (obviously) support their own agenda. In the current case, Chris Anderson and his End of Theory paradigm. Briefly and mildly discussed by Andrew a few years ago.

## Bayes at the Bac’ [again]

Posted in Kids, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2014 by xi'an

When my son took the mathematics exam of the baccalauréat a few years ago, the probability problem was a straightforward application of Bayes’ theorem.  (Problem which was later cancelled due to a minor leak…) Surprise, surprise, Bayes is back this year for my daughter’s exam. Once again, the topic is a pharmaceutical lab with a test, test with different positive rates on two populations (healthy vs. sick), and the very basic question is to derive the probability that a person is sick given the test is positive. Then a (predictable) application of the CLT-based confidence interval on a binomial proportion. And the derivation of a normal confidence interval, once again compounded by  a CLT-based confidence interval on a binomial proportion… Fairly straightforward with no combinatoric difficulty.

The other problems were on (a) a sequence defined by the integral

$\int_0^1 (x+e^{-nx})\text{d}x$

(b) solving the equation

$z^4+4z^2+16=0$

in the complex plane and (c) Cartesian 2-D and 3-D geometry, again avoiding abstruse geometric questions… A rather conventional exam from my biased perspective.

## Big Bayes stories in print [and in force]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on May 20, 2014 by xi'an

The special issue of Statistical Science Kerrie Mengersen and I edited over the past three (four?) years is now out in print! Even though many ‘Og readers may have already seen the table of contents, here it is once again. We hope you will enjoy this 100 page long excursion in big Bayesiana. The papers are not freely accessible as “current papers” on the journal website but can yet be found in the “future papers” section. (If a sponsor wants to support turning the papers into open access version, he or she is most welcome to contact us or the IMS!) And, thanks to Larry for reminding me!, available on arXiv. Thanks to all authors, discussants, reviewers and special kudos to Jon Wellner for his constant help and support in putting the special issue together!