 Statistical evidence and surprise unified under possibility theoryDavid R. Bickel Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 2023, vol. 50, issue 3, 923-928 Abstract: Sander Greenland argues that reported results of hypothesis tests should include the surprisal, the base‐2 logarithm of the reciprocal of a p‐value. The surprisal measures how many bits of evidence in the data warrant rejecting the null hypothesis. A generalization of surprisal also can measure how much the evidence justifies rejecting a composite hypothesis such as the complement of a confidence interval. That extended surprisal, called surprise, quantifies how many bits of astonishment an agent believing a hypothesis would experience upon observing the data. While surprisal is a function of a point in hypothesis space, surprise is a function of a subset of hypothesis space. Satisfying the conditions of conditional min‐plus probability, surprise inherits a wealth of tools from possibility theory. The equivalent compatibility function has been recently applied to the replication crisis, to adjusting p‐values for prior information, and to comparing scientific theories. Date: 2023 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:scjsta:v:50:y:2023:i:3:p:923-928 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Scandinavian Journal of Statistics is currently edited by ÿrnulf Borgan and Bo Lindqvist More articles in Scandinavian Journal of Statistics from Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics, Finnish Statistical Society, Norwegian Statistical Association, Swedish Statistical Association |
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