Background: Former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik has argued that several win streaks of Hikaru Nakamura on chess.com are unusually long. Can we analyze these streaks to amass statistical evidence that something fishy is going on? In last week’s blogpost, I argued that the likelihood principle does not license the selection of a particular streak from a longer time series. It…
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Recently I was attended to a paper by Maharaj, Polson, and Sokolov, in which they provided a statistical analysis of a chess cheating allegation. Their abstract: We provide a statistical analysis of the recent controversy between Vladimir Kramnik (ex chess world champion) and Hikaru Nakamura. Hikaru Nakamura is a chess prodigy and a five-time United States chess champion. Kramnik called…
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In a recent blogpost I introduced Marlijn Bouwman‘s painting of Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), godfather of Bayesian inference. The painting is available under a CC-BY license (and available from the artwork library on this site). This very painting now forms the cover of De Psycholoog, a Dutch magazine devoted to psychological science and insights relevant for psychological practice. Here is…
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[Featured image taken from a painting by Marlijn Bouwman under a CC-BY license (and available from the artwork library on this site)] In the 1930s, the polymath Harold Jeffreys developed a general Bayesian philosophy on hypothesis testing. Essentially, Jeffreys wanted to formalize the idea of scientific caution in statistical reasoning. Jeffreys argued that “variation must be taken as random until…
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Recently I commissioned a painting of Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), whose groundbreaking Bayesian work remains a constant source of inspiration to me personally. The painting is now hanging in my office overlooking the chaos below, but I want to share it with the world as well. The painter is Marlijn Bouwman, and the painting is available under a CC-BY license…
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This week marked the launch of a new diamond open-access journal: the Journal of Robustness Reports. This journal will publish short reanalyses of published empirical research findings. This is the abstract of the editorial: The vast majority of empirical research articles report a single primary analysis outcome that is the result of a single analysis plan, executed by a…
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Inspired by an article on Ockham’s razor by Johnjoe McFadden, a previous post showed how a simple set of polyhedral dice can clarify the basic idea underlying Bayes factors. In the photo below, you see a family of four polyhedral dice: the D3, the D6 (this is the common six-sided die), the D12, and the D60. The Setup You may assume…
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Here we present a Bayesian analysis of data from a recent labor law case [cc; see also Hummel, 2024]. In the case, several trade unions argued that the Dutch Supreme Court had issued particular judgments (i.e., the “Enerco” judgment from 2014 and the “Amsta” judgment from 2015) that effectively imply legal restrictions on collective actions. The trade unions argue that…
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