Talk:Foundations of statistics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Statistics, which collaborates to improve Wikipedia's coverage of statistics. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page.
Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 2008-01-31. The result of the discussion was keep.

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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. … Since 1999 the code seems to be 62A01, 'Foundational and philosophical topics.' EdJohnston

TheSeven (talk) 15:13, 3 February 2008 (UTC)