December 20, 2009
The NYT recently ran an article on the math behind the recent and controversial mammogram advisory change. Unsurprisingly, it is heavily centered on a Bayesian argument. Of course, the key point here is not that the statistics dictated the change, but that budgets and political agendas dictated an acceptable level, which the statistics subsequently informed: [...]
Read the whole post →
October 30, 2009
Increasingly, I've noted in my discussions with statisticians and practitioners a reliance on Bayesian methods. Bayesian statistics rely on an understanding of the uncertainty of a hypothesis. For example, Bayesian hypotheses are literally updated as new information becomes available. Bayesian analyses will also rely heavily on conditional probabilities, or the understanding of likelihoods that depend [...]
Read the whole post →