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Testing Simple Hypotheses

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Summary

Pre-experimental Frequentist error probabilities do not summarize adequately the strength of evidence from data. The Conditional Frequentist paradigm overcomes this problem by selecting a “neutral” statistic S to reflect the strength of the evidence and reporting a conditional error probability, given the observed value of S. We introduce a neutral statistic S that makes the Conditional Frequentist error reports identical to Bayesian posterior probabilities of the hypotheses. In symmetrical cases we can show this strategy to be optimal from the Frequentist perspective. A Conditional Frequentist who uses such a strategy can exploit the consistency of the method with the Likelihood Principle — for example, the validity of sequential hypothesis tests even if the stopping rule is informative or is incompletely specified.

Research supported by United States National Science Foundation grant DMS-9305699 and Environmental Protection Agency grant CR822047-01-0, and performed in collaboration with James O. Berger and Lawrence D. Brown.

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References

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg

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Wolpert, R.L. (1996). Testing Simple Hypotheses. In: Bock, HH., Polasek, W. (eds) Data Analysis and Information Systems. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80098-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80098-6_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60774-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-80098-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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