For better or for worse, it appears that my most appreciated work is the children’s book Bayesian Thinking for Toddlers (the intro post is here and an exegesis is here). Piled up in my office is a stack of self-printed hardcopies that I hand out to students and colleagues; other than that, the book is not easy to obtain. Maybe…
read more
The statistical significance test was not invented by Ronald Fisher. The key idea was already laid out by Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926), whose 1885 article “Methods of statistics” is quite explicit about the purpose, design, and interpretation of the significance test. As summarized by Kennedy-Shaffer: In 1885, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth provided a more formal mathematical underpinning for the significance test…
read more
The logarithm is a key concept in mathematics and statistics. Most students will be introduced to the logarithm as the function that is the inverse of exponentiation, or the function that turns multiplication into addition. But without a good intuition of what the logarithm actually is, students can struggle to remember how to compute the logarithm of base r for…
read more
This post is a teaser for Velidi, P., Wei, Z., Kalaria, S. N., Liu, Y., Laumont, C. M., Nelson, B. H., & Nathoo, F. S. (2025). Generalized Jeffreys’s approximate objective Bayes factor: Model-selection consistency, finite-sample accuracy, and statistical evidence in 71,126 clinical trial findings. ArXiv preprint:2510.10358. Abstract “Concerns about the misuse and misinterpretation of p-values and statistical significance have motivated…
read more
My colleague Raoul Grasman and I recently posted the preprint “A discrepancy measure based on expected posterior probability“. In this preprint, we show that the expected posterior probability for a true model Hf equals the expected posterior probability for a true alternative model Hg. It is not immediately obvious why this should be the case. In Appendix A of the…
read more
František Bartoš recently attended me to a podcast discussing my 3p√n paper (Wagenmakers, 2022). A podcast host and a statistician are discussing the contents of the paper for about 12 minutes; the link to the podcast is here. As I listened to the podcast, a few things stood out: The host and the statistician interpreted the contents of the paper…
read more
Mounted on a bridge across the river Rubicon, the bust of Julius Caesar eyes the Adriatic sea. Caesar’s nose is shiny, perhaps (but his is speculative, based on limited observations) because passersby feel tempted to touch it with their index finger. A high resolution version is available here (CC-BY). Photo taken by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, August 4, 2024. In 49 BC,…
read more
The picture of the Texas sharpshooter is available in our artwork library (CC-BY). Artwork by Dirk-Jan Hoek, concept by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. In a 2018 blog post I mentioned that it is unclear who first came up with analogy of the Texas sharpshooter: The infamous Texas sharpshooter fires randomly at a barn door and then paints the targets around the bullet…
read more