1. DISCUSSION OF PAPER BY I. J. GOOD, APRIL 9, 1968.
- Author
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Anscombe, F. J.
- Subjects
- *
BAYESIAN analysis , *GOODNESS-of-fit tests , *STATISTICAL hypothesis testing , *STATISTICIANS , *PLANETS , *SOLAR system - Abstract
The article presents discussion of a paper by statistician I.J. Good. The author supposes that most statisticians approaching the problem of testing goodness of fit would have been very much less ambitious than Good has been. Most of the people, if spend some time looking at the first planet, Mercury and the last two, Neptune and Pluto, do not agree with Bode's law, whereas all the intermediate planets from Venus to Uranus seem to fit the law remarkably well. Those statisticians who were sufficiently knowledgeable would presumably meditate on the matters that Good has meditated on; but, having done this, most people would make a merely informal judgment and completely shirk the challenge that Good has met, to evaluate the weight of evidence. Good remarks that if one is going to test goodness of fit of a theory to some data, using either a Neyman-Pearson approach or a Bayesian approach, one have to frame explicit hypotheses. Over a good many years the author has, from time to time tried to think about the general problem of testing goodness of fit, and remain skeptical about whether goodness of fit can be adequately discussed either in Neyrnan-Pearson or in Bayesian terms because of this necessity to have, not only an explicit null hypothesis, but also a fully defined explicit alternative hypothesis or set of alternative hypotheses.
- Published
- 1969
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