# Understanding Bayes: How to become a Bayesian in eight easy steps

### How to become a Bayesian in eight easy steps: An annotated reading list

(TLDR: We wrote an annotated reading list to get you started in learning Bayesian statistics. Published version. .)

It can be hard to know where to start when you want to learn about Bayesian statistics. I am frequently asked to share my favorite introductory resources to Bayesian statistics, and my go-to answer has been to share a dropbox folder with a bunch of PDFs that aren’t really sorted or cohesive. In some sense I was acting as little more than a glorified Google Scholar search bar.

It seems like there is some tension out there with regard to Bayes, in that many people want to know more about it, but when they pick up, say, Andrew Gelman and colleagues’ Bayesian Data Analysis they get totally overwhelmed. And then they just think, “Screw this esoteric B.S.” and give up because it doesn’t seem like it is worth their time or effort.

I think this happens a lot. Introductory Bayesian texts usually assume a level of training in mathematical statistics that most researchers simply don’t have time (or otherwise don’t need) to learn. There are actually a lot of accessible Bayesian resources out there that don’t require much math stat background at all, but it just so happens that they are not consolidated anywhere so people don’t necessarily know about them.

### Enter the eight step program

Beth Baribault, Peter Edelsbrunner (@peter1328), Fabian Dablander (@fdabl), Quentin Gronau, and I have just finished a new paper that tries to remedy this situation, titled, “How to become a Bayesian in eight easy steps: An annotated reading list.” We were invited to submit this paper for a special issue on Bayesian statistics for Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. Each paper in the special issue addresses a specific question we often hear about Bayesian statistics, and ours was the following:

I am a reviewer/editor handling a manuscript that uses Bayesian methods; which articles should I read to get a quick idea of what that means?

So the paper‘s goal is not so much to teach readers how to actually perform Bayesian data analysis — there are other papers in the special issue for that — but to facilitate readers in their quest to understand basic Bayesian concepts. We think it will serve as a nice introductory reading list for any interested researcher.

The format of the paper is straightforward. We highlight eight papers that had a big impact on our own understanding of Bayesian statistics, as well as short descriptions of an additional 28 resources in the Further reading appendix. The first four papers are focused on theoretical introductions, and the second four have a slightly more applied focus.

We also give every resource a ranking from 1–9 on two dimensions: Focus (theoretical vs. applied) and Difficulty (easy vs. hard). We tried to provide a wide range of resources, from easy applications (#14: Wagenmakers, Lee, and Morey’s “Bayesian benefits for the pragmatic researcher”) to challenging theoretical discussions (#12: Edwards, Lindman and Savage’s “Bayesian statistical inference for psychological research”) and others in between.

The figure below (Figure A1, available on the last page of the paper) summarizes our rankings:

The emboldened numbers (1–8) are the papers that we’ve commented on in detail, numbers in light text (9–30) are papers we briefly describe in the appendix, and the italicized numbers (31–36) are our recommended introductory books (also listed in the appendix).

This is how we chose to frame the paper,

Overall, the guide is designed such that a researcher might be able to read all eight of the highlighted articles and some supplemental readings within a few days. After readers acquaint themselves with these sources, they should be well-equipped both to interpret existing research and to evaluate new research that relies on Bayesian methods.

### The list

Here’s the list of papers we chose to cover in detail:

1.  Lindley (1993): The analysis of experimental data: The appreciation of tea and wine. PDF.
2. Kruschke (2015, chapter 2): Introduction: Credibility, models, and parameters. Available on the DBDA website.
3. Dienes (2011): Bayesian versus orthodox statistics: Which side are you on? PDF.
4. Rouder, Speckman, Sun, Morey, & Iverson (2009): Bayesian t tests for accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis. PDF.
5. Vandekerckhove, Matzke, & Wagenmakers (2014): Model comparison and the principle of parsimony. PDF.
6. van de Schoot, Kaplan, Denissen, Asendorpf, Neyer, & Aken (2014): A gentle introduction to Bayesian analysis: Applications to developmental research. PDF.
7. Lee and Vanpaemel (from the same special issue): Determining priors for cognitive models. PDF.
8. Lee (2008): Three case studies in the Bayesian analysis of cognitive models. PDF.

You’ll have to check out the paper to see our commentary and to find out what other articles we included in the Further reading appendix. We provide urls (web archived when possible; archive.org/web/) to PDFs of the eight main papers (except #2, that’s on the DBDA website), and wherever possible for the rest of the resources (some did not have free copies online; see the References).

I thought this was a fun paper to write, and if you think you might want to learn some Bayesian basics I hope you will consider reading it.

Oh, and I should mention that we wrote the whole paper collaboratively on Overleaf.com. It is a great site that makes it easy to get started using LaTeX, and I highly recommend trying it out.

This is the fifth post in the Understanding Bayes series. Until next time,

# Slides: “Bayesian statistical concepts: A gentle introduction”

I recently gave a talk in Bielefeld, Germany with the title “Bayesian statistical concepts: A gentle introduction.” I had a few people ask for the slides so I figured I would post them here. If you are a regular reader of this blog, it should all look pretty familiar. It was a mesh of a couple of my Understanding Bayes posts, combining “A look at the Likelihood” and the most recent one, “” The main goal was to give the audience an appreciation for the comparative nature of Bayesian statistical evidence, as well as demonstrate how evidence in the sample has to be interpreted in the context of the specific problem. I didn’t go into Bayes factors or posterior estimation because I promised that it would be a simple and easy talk about the basic concepts.

I’m very grateful to JP de Ruiter for inviting me out to Bielefeld to give this talk, in part because it was my first talk ever! I think it went well enough, but there are a lot of things I can improve on; both in terms of slide content and verbal presentation. JP is very generous with his compliments, and he also gave me a lot of good pointers to incorporate for the next time I talk Bayes.

The main narrative of my talk was that we were to draw candies from one of two possible bags and try to figure out which bag we were drawing from. After each of the slides where I proposed the game I had a member of the audience actually come up and play it with me. The candies, bags, and cards were real but the bets were hypothetical. It was a lot of fun. 🙂

Here is a picture JP took during the talk.

Here are the slides. (You can download a pdf copy from here.)

# Understanding Bayes: Updating priors via the likelihood

[Some material from this post has been incorporated into a paper to be published in AMPPS]

In a previous post I outlined the basic idea behind likelihoods and likelihood ratios. Likelihoods are relatively straightforward to understand because they are based on tangible data. Collect your data, and then the likelihood curve shows the relative support that your data lend to various simple hypotheses. Likelihoods are a key component of Bayesian inference because they are the bridge that gets us from prior to posterior.

In this post I explain how to use the likelihood to update a prior into a posterior. The simplest way to illustrate likelihoods as an updating factor is to use conjugate distribution families (Raiffa & Schlaifer, 1961). A prior and likelihood are said to be conjugate when the resulting posterior distribution is the same type of distribution as the prior. This means that if you have binomial data you can use a beta prior to obtain a beta posterior. If you had normal data you could use a normal prior and obtain a normal posterior. Conjugate priors are not required for doing bayesian updating, but they make the calculations a lot easier so they are nice to use if you can.

I’ll use some data from a recent NCAA 3-point shooting contest to illustrate how different priors can converge into highly similar posteriors.

## The data

This year’s NCAA shooting contest was a thriller that saw Cassandra Brown of the Portland Pilots win the grand prize. This means that she won the women’s contest and went on to defeat the men’s champion in a shoot-off. This got me thinking, just how good is Cassandra Brown?

What a great chance to use some real data in a toy example. She completed 4 rounds of shooting, with 25 shots in each round, for a total of 100 shots (I did the math). The data are counts, so I’ll be using the binomial distribution as a data model (i.e., the likelihood. See this previous post for details). Her results were the following:

Round 1: 13/25               Round 2: 12/25               Round 3: 14/25               Round 4: 19/25

Total: 58/100

The likelihood curve below encompasses the entirety of statistical evidence that our 3-point data provide (footnote 1). The hypothesis with the most relative support is .58, and the curve is moderately narrow since there are quite a few data points. I didn’t standardize the height of the curve in order to keep it comparable to the other curves I’ll be showing.

## The prior

Now the part that people often make a fuss about: choosing the prior. There are a few ways to choose a prior. Since I am using a binomial likelihood, I’ll be using a conjugate beta prior. A beta prior has two shape parameters that determine what it looks like, and is denoted Beta(α, β). I like to think of priors in terms of what kind of information they represent. The shape parameters α and β can be thought of as prior observations that I’ve made (or imagined).

Imagine my trusted friend caught the end of Brown’s warm-up and saw her take two shots, making one and missing the other, and she tells me this information. This would mean I could reasonably use the common Beta(1, 1) prior, which represents a uniform density over [0, 1]. In other words, all possible values for Brown’s shooting percentage are given equal weight before taking data into account, because the only thing I know about her ability is that both outcomes are possible (Lee & Wagenmakers, 2005).

Another common prior is called Jeffreys’s prior, a Beta(1/2, 1/2) which forms a wide bowl shape. This prior would be recommended if you had extremely scarce information about Brown’s ability. Is Brown so good that she makes nearly every shot, or is she so bad that she misses nearly every shot? This prior says that Brown’s shooting rate is probably near the extremes, which may not necessarily reflect a reasonable belief for someone who is a college basketball player, but it has the benefit of having less influence on the posterior estimates than the uniform prior (since it is equal to 1 prior observation instead of 2). Jeffreys’s prior is popular because it has some desirable properties, such as invariance under parameter transformation (Jaynes, 2003). So if instead of asking about Brown’s shooting percentage I instead wanted to know her shooting percentage squared or cubed, Jeffreys’s prior would remain the same shape while many other priors would drastically change shape.

Or perhaps I had another trusted friend who had arrived earlier and seen Brown take her final 13 shots in warm-up, and she saw 4 makes and 9 misses. Then I could use a Beta(4, 9) prior to characterize this prior information, which looks like a hump over .3 with density falling slowly as it moves outward in either direction. This prior has information equivalent to 13 shots, or roughly an extra 1/2 round of shooting.

These three different priors are shown below.

These are but three possible priors one could use. In your analysis you can use any prior you want, but if you want to be taken seriously you’d better give some justification for it. Bayesian inference allows many rules for prior construction.”This is my personal prior” is a technically a valid reason, but if this is your only justification then your colleagues/reviewers/editors will probably not take your results seriously.

## Updating the prior via the likelihood

Now for the easiest part. In order to obtain a posterior, simply use Bayes’s rule:

$\ Posterior \propto Likelihood \ X \ Prior$

The posterior is proportional to the likelihood multiplied by the prior. What’s nice about working with conjugate distributions is that Bayesian updating really is as simple as basic algebra. We take the formula for the binomial likelihood, which from a previous post is known to be:

$\ Likelihood \ = \ p^x \big(1-p \big)^{n-x}$

and then multiply it by the formula for the beta prior with α and β shape parameters:

$\ Prior \ = \ p^{\alpha-1} \big(1-p \big)^{\beta-1}$

to obtain the following formula for the posterior:

$\ Posterior \ = \ p^x \big(1-p \big)^{n-x} p^{\alpha-1} \big(1-p \big)^{\beta-1}$

With a little bit of algebra knowledge, you’ll know that multiplying together terms with the same base means the exponents can be added together. So the posterior formula can be rewritten as:

$\ Posterior \ = \ p^x p^{\alpha-1}\big(1-p \big)^{n-x} \big(1-p \big)^{\beta-1}$

and then by adding the exponents together the formula simplifies to:

$\ Posterior \ = \ p^{\alpha-1+x} \big(1-p \big)^{\beta-1+n-x}$

and it’s that simple! Take the prior, add the successes and failures to the different exponents, and voila. The distributional notation is even simpler. Take the prior, Beta(α, β), and add the successes from the data, x, to α and the failures, n – x, to β, and there’s your posterior, Beta(α+x, β+n-x).

Remember from the previous post that likelihoods don’t care about what order the data arrive in, it always results in the same curve. This property of likelihoods is carried over to posterior updating. The formulas above serve as another illustration of this fact. It doesn’t matter if you add a string of six single data points, 1+1+1+1+1+1+1 or a batch of +6 data points; the posterior formula in either case ends up with 6 additional points in the exponents.

## Looking at some posteriors

Back to Brown’s shooting data. She had four rounds of shooting so I’ll treat each round as a batch of new data. Her results for each round were: 13/25, 12/25, 14/25, 19/25. I’ll show how the different priors are updated with each batch of data. A neat thing about bayesian updating is that after batch 1 is added to the initial prior, its posterior is used as the prior for the next batch of data. And as the formulas above indicate, the order or frequency of additions doesn’t make a difference on the final posterior. I’ll verify this at the end of the post.

In the following plots, the prior is shown in blue (as above), the likelihood in orange (as above), and the resulting posteriors after Brown’s first 13/25 makes in purple.

In the first and second plot the likelihood is nearly invisible because the posterior sits right on top of it. When the prior has only 1 or 2 data points worth of information, it has essentially no impact on the posterior shape (footnote 2). The third plot shows how the posterior splits the difference between the likelihood and the informed prior based on the relative quantity of information in each.

The posteriors obtained from the uniform and Jeffreys’s priors suggest the best guess for Brown’s shooting percentage is around 50%, whereas the posterior obtained from the informed prior suggests it is around 40%. No surprise here since the informed prior represents another 1/2 round of shots where Brown performed poorly, which shifts the posterior towards lower values. But all three posteriors are still quite broad, and the breadth of the curves can be thought to represent the uncertainty in my estimates. More data -> tighter curves -> less uncertainty.

Now I’ll add the second round performance as a new likelihood (12/25 makes), and I’ll take the posteriors from the first round of updating as new priors for the second round of updating. So the purple posteriors from the plots above are now blue priors, the likelihood is orange again, and the new posteriors are purple.

The left two plots look nearly identical, which should be no surprise since their posteriors were essentially equivalent after only 1 round of data updates. The third plot shows a posterior still slightly shifted to the left of the others, but it is much more in line with them than before. All three posteriors are getting narrower as more data is added.

The last two rounds of updating are shown below, again with posteriors from the previous round taken as priors for the next round. At this point they’ve all converged to very similar posteriors that are much narrower, translating to less uncertainty in my estimates.

These posterior distributions look pretty similar now! Just as an illustration, I’ll show what happens when I update the initial priors with all of the data at once.

As the formulas predict, the posteriors after one big batch of data are identical to those obtained by repeatedly adding multiple smaller batches of data. It’s also a little easier to see the discrepancies between the final posteriors in this illustration because the likelihood curve acts as a visual anchor. The uniform and Jeffreys’s priors result in posteriors that essentially fall right on top of the likelihood, whereas the informed prior results in a posterior that is very slightly shifted to the left of the likelihood.

My takeaway from these posteriors is that Cassandra Brown has a pretty damn good 3-point shot! In a future post I’ll explain how to use this method of updating to make inferences using Bayes factors. It’s called the Savage-Dickey density method, and I think it’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

## Notes:

Footnote 1: I’m making a major assumption about the data: Any one shot is exchangeable with any other shot. This might not be defensible since the final ball on each rack is worth a bonus point, so maybe those shots differ systematically from regular shots, but it’s a toy example so I’ll ignore that possibility. There’s also the possibility of her going on a hot streak, a.k.a. having a “hot hand”, but I’m going to ignore that too because I’m the one writing this blog post and I want to keep it simple. There’s also the possibility that she gets worse throughout the competition because she gets tired, but then there’s also the possibility that she gets better as she warms up with multiple rounds. All of these things are reasonable to consider and I am going to ignore them all.

Footnote 2: There is a tendency to call any priors that have very little impact on the posterior “non-informative”, but, as I mentioned in the section on determining priors, uniform priors that seem non-informative in one context can become highly informative with parameter transformation (Zhu & Lu, 2004). Jeffreys’s prior was derived precisely with that in mind, so it carries little information no matter what transformation is applied.

## References:

Jaynes, E. T. (2003). Probability theory: The logic of science. Cambridge University Press.

Lee, M. D., & Wagenmakers, E. J. (2005). Bayesian statistical inference in psychology: Comment on Trafimow (2003). Psychological Review, 112(3), 662-668.

Raiffa, H. & Schlaifer, R. (1961). Applied statistical decision theory. Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.

Zhu, M., & Lu, A. Y. (2004). The counter-intuitive non-informative prior for the Bernoulli family. Journal of Statistics Education, 12(2), 1-10.

Today on Twitter there was some chatting about one-sided p-values. Daniel Lakens thinks that by 2018 we’ll see a renaissance of one-sided p-values due to the advent of preregistration. There was a great conversation that followed Daniel’s tweet, so go click the link above and read it and we’ll pick this back up once you do.

Okay.

As you have seen, and is typical of discussions around p-values in general, the question of evidence arises. How do one-sided p-values relate to two-sided p-values as measures of statistical evidence? In this post I will argue that thinking through the logic of one-sided p-values highlights a true illogic of significance testing. This example is largely adapted from Royall’s 1997 book.

### The setup

The idea behind Fisher’s significance tests goes something like this. We have a hypothesis that we wish to find evidence against. If the evidence is strong enough then we can reject this hypothesis. I will use the binomial example because it lends itself to good storytelling, but this works for any test.

Premise A: Say I wish to determine if my coin is unfair. That is, I want to reject the hypothesis, H1, that the probability of heads is equal to ½. This is a standard two-sided test. If I flip my coin a few times and observe x heads, I can reject H1 (at level α) if the probability of obtaining x or more heads is less than α/2. If my α is set to the standard level, .05, then I can reject H1 if Pr(x or more heads) ≤ .025. In this framework, I have strong evidence that the probability of heads is not equal to ½ if my p-value is lower than .025. That is, I can claim (at level α) that the probability of heads is either greater than ½ or less than ½ (proposition A).

Premise B: If I have some reason to think the coin might be biased one way or the other, say there is a kid on the block with a coin biased to come up heads more often than not, then I might want to use a one-sided test. In this test, the hypothesis to be rejected, H2, is that the probability of heads is less than or equal to ½. In this case I can reject H2 (at level α) if the probability of obtaining x or more heads is less than α. If my α is set to the standard level again, .05, then I can reject H2 if Pr(x or more heads) < .05. Now I have strong evidence that the probability of heads is not equal to ½, nor is it less than ½, if my p-value is less than .05. That is, I can claim (again at level α) that the probability of heads is greater than ½.  (proposition B).

As you can see, proposition B is a stronger logical claim than proposition A. Saying that my car is faster than your car is making a stronger claim than saying that my car is either faster or slower than your car.

If I obtain a result x, such that α/2 < Pr(x or more heads) < α, (e.g., .025 < p < .05), then I have strong evidence for the conclusion that the probability of heads is greater than ½ (see proposition B). But at the same time I do not have strong evidence for the conclusion that the probability of heads is > ½ or < ½ (see proposition A).

I have defied the rules of logic. I have concluded the stronger proposition, probability of heads > ½, but I cannot conclude the weaker proposition, probability of heads > ½ or < ½. As Royall (1997, p. 77) would say, if the evidence justifies the conclusion that the probability of heads is greater than ½ then surely it justifies the weaker conclusion that the probability of heads is either > ½ or < ½.

### Should we use one-sided p-values?

Go ahead, I can’t stop you. But be aware that if you try to interpret p-values, either one- or two-sided, as measures of statistical (logical) evidence then you may find yourself in a p-value paradox.

Royall, R. (1997). Statistical evidence: A likelihood paradigm (Vol. 71). CRC press. Chapter 3.7.

# Understanding Bayes: A Look at the Likelihood

[This post has been updated and turned into a paper to be published in AMPPS]

Much of the discussion in psychology surrounding Bayesian inference focuses on priors. Should we embrace priors, or should we be skeptical? When are Bayesian methods sensitive to specification of the prior, and when do the data effectively overwhelm it? Should we use context specific prior distributions or should we use general defaults? These are all great questions and great discussions to be having.

One thing that often gets left out of the discussion is the importance of the likelihood. The likelihood is the workhorse of Bayesian inference. In order to understand Bayesian parameter estimation you need to understand the likelihood. In order to understand Bayesian model comparison (Bayes factors) you need to understand the likelihood and likelihood ratios.

## What is likelihood?

Likelihood is a funny concept. It’s not a probability, but it is proportional to a probability. The likelihood of a hypothesis (H) given some data (D) is proportional to the probability of obtaining D given that H is true, multiplied by an arbitrary positive constant (K). In other words, L(H|D) = K · P(D|H). Since a likelihood isn’t actually a probability it doesn’t obey various rules of probability. For example, likelihood need not sum to 1.

A critical difference between probability and likelihood is in the interpretation of what is fixed and what can vary. In the case of a conditional probability, P(D|H), the hypothesis is fixed and the data are free to vary. Likelihood, however, is the opposite. The likelihood of a hypothesis, L(H|D), conditions on the data as if they are fixed while allowing the hypotheses to vary.

The distinction is subtle, so I’ll say it again. For conditional probability, the hypothesis is treated as a given and the data are free to vary. For likelihood, the data are a given and the hypotheses vary.

## The Likelihood Axiom

Edwards (1992, p. 30) defines the Likelihood Axiom as a natural combination of the Law of Likelihood and the Likelihood Principle.

The Law of Likelihood states that “within the framework of a statistical model, a particular set of data supports one statistical hypothesis better than another if the likelihood of the first hypothesis, on the data, exceeds the likelihood of the second hypothesis” (Emphasis original. Edwards, 1992, p. 30).

In other words, there is evidence for H1 vis-a-vis H2 if and only if the probability of the data under H1 is greater than the probability of the data under H2. That is, D is evidence for H1 over H2 if P(D|H1) >  P(D|H2). If these two probabilities are equivalent, then there is no evidence for either hypothesis over the other. Furthermore, the strength of the statistical evidence for H1 over H2 is quantified by the ratio of their likelihoods, L(H1|D)/L(H2|D) (which again is proportional to P(D|H1)/P(D|H2) up to an arbitrary constant that cancels out).

The Likelihood Principle states that the likelihood function contains all of the information relevant to the evaluation of statistical evidence. Other facets of the data that do not factor into the likelihood function are irrelevant to the evaluation of the strength of the statistical evidence (Edwards, 1992, p. 30; Royall, 1997, p. 22). They can be meaningful for planning studies or for decision analysis, but they are separate from the strength of the statistical evidence.

## Likelihoods are meaningless in isolation

Unlike a probability, a likelihood has no real meaning per se due to the arbitrary constant. Only by comparing likelihoods do they become interpretable, because the constant in each likelihood cancels the other one out. The easiest way to explain this aspect of likelihood is to use the binomial distribution as an example.

Suppose I flip a coin 10 times and it comes up 6 heads and 4 tails. If the coin were fair, p(heads) = .5, the probability of this occurrence is defined by the binomial distribution:

$\ P \big(X = x \big) = \binom{n}{x} p^x \big(1-p \big)^{n-x}$

where x is the number of heads obtained, n is the total number of flips, p is the probability of heads, and

$\binom{n}{x} = \frac{n!}{x! (n-x)!}$

Substituting in our values we get

$\ P \big(X = 6 \big) = \frac{10!}{6! (4!)} \big(.5 \big)^6 \big(1-.5 \big)^{4} \approx .21$

If the coin were a trick coin, so that p(heads) = .75, the probability of 6 heads in 10 tosses is:

$\ P \big(X = 6 \big) = \frac{10!}{6! (4!)} \big(.75 \big)^6 \big(1-.75 \big)^{4} \approx .15$

To quantify the statistical evidence for the first hypothesis against the second, we simply divide one probability by the other. This ratio tells us everything we need to know about the support the data lends to one hypothesis vis-a-vis the other.  In the case of 6 heads in 10 tosses, the likelihood ratio (LR) for a fair coin vs our trick coin is:

$LR = \Bigg(\frac{10!}{6! (4!)} \big(.5 \big)^6 \big(1-.5 \big)^4 \Bigg) \div \Bigg(\frac{10!}{6! (4!)} \big(.75 \big)^6 \big(1-.75 \big)^4 \Bigg) \approx .21/.15 \approx 1.4$

Translation: The data are 1.4 times as probable under a fair coin hypothesis than under this particular trick coin hypothesis. Notice how the first terms in each of the equations above, i.e., $\frac{10!}{6! (4!)}$, are equivalent and completely cancel each other out in the likelihood ratio.

Same data. Same constant. Cancel out.

The first term in the equations above, $\frac{10!}{6! (4!)}$, details our journey to obtaining 6 heads out of 10. If we change our journey (i.e., different sampling plan) then this changes the term’s value, but crucially, since it is the same term in both the numerator and denominator it always cancels itself out. In other words, the information contained in the way the data are obtained disappears from the function. Hence the irrelevance of the stopping rule to the evaluation of statistical evidence, which is something that makes bayesian and likelihood methods valuable and flexible.

If we leave out the first term in the above calculations, our numerator is L(.5) = 0.0009765625 and our denominator is L(.75) ≈ 0.0006952286. Using these values to form the likelihood ratio we get: 0.0009765625/0.0006952286 ≈ 1.4, as we should since the other terms simply cancelled out before.

Again I want to reiterate that the value of a single likelihood is meaningless in isolation; only in comparing likelihoods do we find meaning.

## Looking at likelihoods

Likelihoods may seem overly restrictive at first. We can only compare 2 simple statistical hypotheses in a single likelihood ratio. But what if we are interested in comparing many more hypotheses at once? What if we want to compare all possible hypotheses at once?

In that case we can plot the likelihood function for our data, and this lets us ‘see’ the evidence in its entirety. By plotting the entire likelihood function we compare all possible hypotheses simultaneously. The Likelihood Principle tells us that the likelihood function encompasses all statistical evidence that our data can provide, so we should always plot this function along side our reported likelihood ratios.

Following the wisdom of Birnbaum (1962), “the “evidential meaning” of experimental results is characterized fully by the likelihood function” (as cited in Royall, 1997, p.25). So let’s look at some examples. The R script at the end of this post can be used to reproduce these plots, or you can use it to make your own plots. Play around with it and see how the functions change for different number of heads, total flips, and hypotheses of interest. See the instructions in the script for details.

Below is the likelihood function for 6 heads in 10 tosses. I’ve marked our two hypotheses from before on the likelihood curve with blue dots. Since the likelihood function is meaningful only up to an arbitrary constant, the graph is scaled by convention so that the best supported value (i.e., the maximum) corresponds to a likelihood of 1.

The vertical dotted line marks the hypothesis best supported by the data. The likelihood ratio of any two hypotheses is simply the ratio of their heights on this curve. We can see from the plot that the fair coin has a higher likelihood than our trick coin.

How does the curve change if instead of 6 heads out of 10 tosses, we tossed 100 times and obtained 60 heads?

Our curve gets much narrower! How did the strength of evidence change for the fair coin vs the trick coin? The new likelihood ratio is L(.5)/L(.75) ≈ 29.9. Much stronger evidence!(footnote) However, due to the narrowing, neither of these hypothesized values are very high up on the curve anymore. It might be more informative to compare each of our hypotheses against the best supported hypothesis. This gives us two likelihood ratios: L(.6)/L(.5) ≈ 7.5 and L(.6)/L(.75) ≈ 224.

Here is one more curve, for when we obtain 300 heads in 500 coin flips.

Notice that both of our hypotheses look to be very near the minimum of the graph. Yet their likelihood ratio is much stronger than before. For this data the likelihood ratio L(.5)/L(.75) is nearly 24 million! The inherent relativity of evidence is made clear here: The fair coin was supported when compared to one particular trick coin. But this should not be interpreted as absolute evidence for the fair coin, because the likelihood ratio for the maximally supported hypothesis vs the fair coin, L(.6)/L(.5), is nearly 24 thousand!

We need to be careful not to make blanket statements about absolute support, such as claiming that the maximum is “strongly supported by the data”. Always ask, “Compared to what?” The best supported hypothesis will be only be weakly supported vs any hypothesis just before or just after it on the x-axis. For example, L(.6)/L(.61) ≈ 1.1, which is barely any support one way or the other. It cannot be said enough that evidence for a hypothesis must be evaluated in consideration with a specific alternative.

## Connecting likelihood ratios to Bayes factors

Bayes factors are simple extensions of likelihood ratios. A Bayes factor is a weighted average likelihood ratio based on the prior distribution specified for the hypotheses. (When the hypotheses are simple point hypotheses, the Bayes factor is equivalent to the likelihood ratio.) The likelihood ratio is evaluated at each point of the prior distribution and weighted by the probability we assign that value. If the prior distribution assigns the majority of its probability to values far away from the observed data, then the average likelihood for that hypothesis is lower than one that assigns probability closer to the observed data. In other words, you get a Bayes boost if you make more accurate predictions. Bayes factors are extremely valuable, and in a future post I will tackle the hard problem of assigning priors and evaluating weighted likelihoods.

I hope you come away from this post with a greater knowledge of, and appreciation for, likelihoods. Play around with the R code and you can get a feel for how the likelihood functions change for different data and different hypotheses of interest.

(footnote) Obtaining 60 heads in 100 tosses is equivalent to obtaining 6 heads in 10 tosses 10 separate times. To obtain this new likelihood ratio we can simply multiply our ratios together. That is, raise the first ratio to the power of 10; 1.4^10 ≈ 28.9, which is just slightly off from the correct value of 29.9 due to rounding.

### References

Birnbaum, A. (1962). On the foundations of statistical inference. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 57(298), 269-306.

Edwards, A. W. (1992). Likelihood, expanded ed. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Royall, R. (1997). Statistical evidence: A likelihood paradigm (Vol. 71). CRC press.

# Edwards, Lindman, and Savage (1963) on why the p-value is still so dominant

Below is an excerpt from Edwards, Lindman, and Savage (1963, pp. 236-7), on why p-value procedures continue to be dominant in the empirical sciences even after it has been repeatedly shown to be an incoherent and nonsensical statistic (note: those are my choice of words, the authors are very cordial in their commentary). The age of the article shows in numbers 1 and 2, but I think it is still valuable commentary; Numbers 3 and 4 are still highly relevant today.

From Edwards, Lindman, and Savage (1963, pp. 236-7):

If classical significance tests have rather frequently rejected true null hypotheses without real evidence, why have they survived so long and so dominated certain empirical sciences ? Four remarks seem to shed some light on this important and difficult question.

1. In principle, many of the rejections at the .05 level are based on values of the test statistic far beyond the borderline, and so correspond to almost unequivocal evidence [i.e., passing the interocular trauma test]. In practice, this argument loses much of its force. It has become customary to reject a null hypothesis at the highest significance level among the magic values, .05, .01, and .001, which the test statistic permits, rather than to choose a significance level in advance and reject all hypotheses whose test statistics fall beyond the criterion value specified by the chosen significance level. So a .05 level rejection today usually means that the test statistic was significant at the .05 level but not at the .01 level. Still, a test statistic which falls just short of the .01 level may correspond to much stronger evidence against a null hypothesis than one barely significant at the .05 level. …

2. Important rejections at the .05 or .01 levels based on test statistics which would not have been significant at higher levels are not common. Psychologists tend to run relatively large experiments, and to get very highly significant main effects. The place where .05 level rejections are most common is in testing interactions in analyses of variance—and few experimenters take those tests very seriously, unless several lines of evidence point to the same conclusions. [emphasis added]

3. Attempts to replicate a result are rather rare, so few null hypothesis rejections are subjected to an empirical check. When such a check is performed and fails, explanation of the anomaly almost always centers on experimental design, minor variations in technique, and so forth, rather than on the meaning of the statistical procedures used in the original study.

4. Classical procedures sometimes test null hypotheses that no one would believe for a moment, no matter what the data […] Testing an unbelievable null hypothesis amounts, in practice, to assigning an unreasonably large prior probability to a very small region of possible values of the true parameter. […]The frequent reluctance of empirical scientists to accept null hypotheses which their data do not classically reject suggests their appropriate skepticism about the original plausibility of these null hypotheses. [emphasis added]

References

Edwards, W., Lindman, H., & Savage, L. J. (1963). Bayesian statistical inference for psychological research. Psychological review, 70(3), 193-242.

# Are all significance tests made of the same stuff?

No! If you are like most of the sane researchers out there, you don’t spend your days and nights worrying about the nuances of different statistical concepts. Especially ones as traditional as these. But there is one concept that I think we should all be aware of: P-values mean very different things to different people. Richard Royall (1997, p. 76-7) provides a smattering of different possible interpretations and fleshes out the arguments for why these mixed interpretations are problematic (much of this post comes from his book):

In the testing process the null hypothesis either is rejected or is not rejected. If the null hypothesis is not rejected, we will say that the data on which the test is based do not provide sufficient evidence to cause rejection. (Daniel, 1991, p. 192)

A nonsignificant result does not prove that the null hypothesis is correct — merely that it is tenable — our data do not give adequate grounds for rejecting it. (Snedecor and Cochran, 1980, p. 66)

The verdict does not depend on how much more readily some other hypothesis would explain the data. We do not even start to take that question seriously until we have rejected the null hypothesis. …..The statistical significance level is a statement about evidence… If it is small enough, say p = 0.001, we infer that the result is not readily explained as a chance outcome if the null hypothesis is true and we start to look for an alternative explanation with considerable assurance. (Murphy, 1985, p. 120)

If [the p-value] is small, we have two explanations — a rare event has happened, or the assumed distribution is wrong. This is the essence of the significance test argument. Not to reject the null hypothesis … means only that it is accepted for the moment on a provisional basis. (Watson, 1983)

Test of hypothesis. A procedure whereby the truth or falseness of the tested hypothesis is investigated by examining a value of the test statistic computed from a sample and then deciding to reject or accept the tested hypothesis according to whether the value falls into the critical region or acceptance region, respectively. (Remington and Schork, 1970, p. 200)

Although a ‘significant’ departure provides some degree of evidence against a null hypothesis, it is important to realize that a ‘nonsignificant’ departure does not provide positive evidence in favour of that hypothesis. The situation is rather that we have failed to find strong evidence against the null hypothesis. (Armitage and Berry, 1987, p. 96)

If that value [of the test statistic] is in the region of rejection, the decision is to reject H0; if that value is outside the region of rejection, the decision is that H0 cannot be rejected at the chosen level of significance … The reasoning behind this decision process is very simple. If the probability associated with the occurance under the null hypothesis of a particular value in the sampling distribution is very small, we may explain the actual occurrence of that value in two ways; first we may explain it by deciding that the null hypothesis is false or, second, we may explain it by deciding that a rare and unlikely event has occurred. (Siegel and Castellan, 1988, Chapter 2)

These all mix and match three distinct viewpoints with regard to hypothesis tests: 1) Neyman-Pearson decision procedures, 2) Fisher’s p-value significance tests, and 3) Fisher’s rejection trials (I think 2 and 3 are sufficiently different to be considered separately). Mixing and matching them is inappropriate, as will be shown below. Unfortunately, they all use the same terms so this can get confusing! I’ll do my best to keep things simple.

1. Neyman-Pearson (NP) decision procedure:
Neyman describes it thusly:

The problem of testing a statistical hypothesis occurs when circumstances force us to make a choice between two courses of action: either take step A or take step B… (Neyman 1950, p. 258)

…any rule R prescribing that we take action A when the sample point … falls within a specified category of points, and that we take action B in all other cases, is a test of a statistical hypothesis. (Neyman 1950, p. 258)

The terms ‘accepting’ and ‘rejecting’ a statistical hypothesis are very convenient and well established. It is important, however, to keep their exact meaning in mind and to discard various additional implications which may be suggested by intuition. Thus, to accept a hypothesis H means only to take action A rather than action B. This does not mean that we necessarily believe that the hypothesis H is true. Also if the application … ‘rejects’ H, this means only that the rule prescribes action B and does not imply that we believe that H is false. (Neyman 1950, p. 259)

So what do we take from this? NP testing is about making a decision to choose H0 or H1, not about shedding light on the truth of any one hypothesis or another. We calculate a test statistic, see where it lies with regard to our predefined rejection regions, and make the corresponding decision. We can assure that we are not often wrong by defining Type I and Type II error probabilities (α and β) to be used in our decision procedure. According to this framework, a good test is one that minimizes these long-run error probabilities. It is important to note that this procedure cannot tell us anything about the truth of hypotheses and does not provide us with a measure of evidence of any kind, only a decision to be made according to our criteria. This procedure is notably symmetric — that is, we can either choose H0 or H1.

Test results would look like this:

α and β were prespecified -based on relevant costs associated with the different errors- for this situation at yadda yadda yadda. The test statistic (say, t=2.5) falls inside the rejection region for H0 defined as t>2.0 so we reject H0 and accept H1.” (Alternatively, you might see “p < α = x so we reject H0. The exact value of p is irrelevant, it is either inside or outside of the rejection region defined by α. Obtaining a p = .04 is effectively equivalent to p = .001 for this procedure, as is obtaining a result very much larger than the critical t above.)

2. Fisher’s p-value significance tests

Fisher’s first procedure is only ever concerned with one hypothesis- that being the null. This procedure is not concerned with making decisions (and when in science do we actually ever do that anyway?) but with measuring evidence against the hypothesis. We want to evaluate ‘the strength of evidence against the hypothesis’ (Fisher, 1958, p.80) by evaluating how rare our particular result (or even bigger results) would be if there were really no effect in the study. Our objective here is to calculate a single number that Fisher called the level of significance, or the p-value. Smaller p is more evidence against the hypothesis than larger p. Increasing levels of significance* are often represented** by more asterisks*** in tables or graphs. More asterisks mean lower p-values, and presumably more evidence against the null.

What is the rationale behind this test? There are only two possible interpretations of our low p: either a rare event has occurred, or the underlying hypothesis is false. Fisher doesn’t think the former is reasonable, so we should assume the latter (Bakan, 1966).

Note that this procedure is directly trying to measure the truth value of a hypothesis. Lower ps indicate more evidence against the hypothesis. This is based on the Law of Improbability, that is,

Law of Improbability: If hypothesis A implies that the probability that a random variable X takes on the value x is quite small, say p(x), then the observation X = x is evidence against A, and the smaller p(x), the stronger the evidence. (Royall, 1997, p. 65)

In a future post I will attempt to show why this law is not a valid indicator of evidence. For the purpose of this post we just need to understand the logic behind this test and that it is fundamentally different from NP procedures. This test alone does not provide any guidance with regard to taking action or making a decision, it is intended as a measure of evidence against a hypothesis.

Test results would look like this:

The present results obtain a t value of 2.5, which corresponds to an observed p = .01**. This level of significance is very small and indicates quite strong evidence against the hypothesis of no difference.

3. Fisher’s rejection trials

This is a strange twist on both of the other procedures above, taking elements from each to form a rejection trial. This test is a decision procedure, much like NP procedures, but with only one explicitly defined hypothesis, a la p-value significance tests. The test is most like what psychologists actually use today, framed as two possible decisions, again like NP, but now they are framed in terms of only one hypothesis. Rejection regions are back too, defined as a region of values that have small probability under H0 (i.e., defined by a small α). It is framed as a problem of logic, specifically,

…a process analogous to testing a proposition in formal logic via the argument known as modus tollens, or ‘denying the consequent’: if A implies B, then not-B implies not-A. We can test A by determining whether B is true. If B is false, then we conclude that A is false. But, on the other hand, if B is found to be true we cannot conclude that A is true. That is, A can be proven false by such a test but it cannot be proven true — either we disprove A or we fail to disprove it…. When B is found to be true, so that A survives the test, this result, although not proving A, does seem intuitively to be evidence supporting A. (Royall, 1997, p. 72)

An important caveat is that these tests are probabilistic in nature, so the logical implications aren’t quite right. Nevertheless, rejection trials are what Fisher referred to when he famously said,

Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis… The notion of an error of the so-called ‘second kind,’ due to accepting the null hypothesis ‘when it is false’ … has no meaning with reference to simple tests of significance. (Fisher, 1966)

So there is a major difference from NP — With rejection trials you have a single hypothesis (as opposed to 2) combined with decision rules of “reject the H0 or do not reject H0” (as opposed to reject H0/H1 or accept H0/H1). With rejection trials we are back to making a decision. This test is asymmetric (as opposed to NP which is symmetric) — that is, we can only ever reject H0, never accept it.

While we are making decisions with rejection trials, the decisions have a different meaning than that of NP procedures. In this framework, deciding to reject H0 implies the hypothesis is “inconsistent with the data” or that the data “provide sufficient evidence to cause rejection” of the hypothesis (Royall, 1997, p.74). So rejection trials are intended to be both decision procedures and measures of evidence. Test statistics that fall into smaller α regions are considered stronger evidence, much the same way that a smaller p-value indicates more evidence against the hypothesis. For NP procedures α is simply a property of the test, and choosing a lower one has no evidential meaning per se (although see Mayo, 1996 for a 4th significance procedure — severity testing).

Test results would look like this:

The present results obtain a t = 2.5, p = .01, which is sufficiently strong evidence against H0 to warrant its rejection.

What is the takeaway?

If you aren’t aware of the difference between the three types of hypothesis testing procedures, you’ll find yourself jumbling them all up (Gigerenzer, 2004). If you aren’t careful, you may end up thinking you have a measure of evidence when you actually have a guide to action.

Which one is correct?

Funny enough, I don’t endorse any of them. I contend that p-values never measure evidence (in either p-value procedures or rejection trials) and NP procedures lead to absurdities that I can’t in good faith accept while simultaneously endorsing them.

Why write 2000 words clarifying the nuanced differences between three procedures I think are patently worthless? Well, did you see what I said at the top referring to sane researchers?

A future post is coming that will explicate the criticisms of each procedure, many of the points again coming from Royall’s book.

References

Armitage, P., & Berry, G. (1987). Statistical methods in medical research. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.

Bakan, D. (1966). The test of significance in psychological research.Psychological bulletin, 66(6), 423.

Daniel, W. W. (1991). Hypothesis testing. Biostatistics: a foundation for analysis in the health sciences5, 191.

Fisher, R. A. (1958).Statistical methods for research workers (13th ed.). New York: Hafner.

Fisher, R. A. (1966). The design of experiments (8th edn.) Oliver and Boyd.

Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Mindless statistics. The Journal of Socio-Economics,33(5), 587-606.

Mayo, D. G. (1996). Error and the growth of experimental knowledge. University of Chicago Press.

Murphy, E. A. (1985). A companion to medical statistics. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Neyman, J. (1950). First course in probability and statistic. Published by Henry Holt, 1950.,1.

Remington, R. D., & Schork, M. A. (1970). Statistics with applications to the biological and health sciences.

Royall, R. (1997). Statistical evidence: a likelihood paradigm (Vol. 71). CRC press.

Siegel, S. C., & Castellan, J. NJ (1988). Nonparametric statistics for the behavioural sciences. New York, McGraw-Hill.

Snedecor, G. W. WG Cochran. 1980. Statistical Methods. Iowa State Univ. Press, Ames.

Watson, G. S. (1983). Hypothesis testing. Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability.