This book provides an overview of recent work on developing a theory of statistical inference based on measuring statistical evidence. It attempts to establish a gold standard for how a statistical analysis should proceed. The book illustrates relative belief theory using many examples and describes the strengths and weaknesses of the theory. The author also addresses fundamental statistical issues, including the meaning of probability, the role of subjectivity, the meaning of objectivity, and the role of infinity and continuity.

Mounting failures of replication in social and biological sciences give a new urgency to critically appraising proposed reforms. This book pulls back the cover on disagreements between experts charged with restoring integrity to science. It denies two pervasive views of the role of probability in inference: to assign degrees of belief, and to control error rates in a long run. If statistical consumers are unaware of assumptions behind rival evidence reforms, they can't scrutinize the consequences that affect them (in personalized medicine, psychology, etc.). The book sets sail with a simple tool: if little has been done to rule out flaws in inferring a claim, then it has not passed a severe test. Many methods advocated by data experts do not stand up to severe scrutiny and are in tension with successful strategies for blocking or accounting for cherry picking and selective reporting. Through a series of excursions and exhibits, the philosophy and history of inductive inference come alive. Philosophical tools are put to work to solve problems about science and pseudoscience, induction and falsification.

Interpreting statistical data as evidence, Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm focuses on the law of likelihood, fundamental to solving many of the problems associated with interpreting data in this way. Statistics has long neglected this principle, resulting in a seriously defective methodology. This book redresses the balance, explaining why science has clung to a defective methodology despite its well-known defects. After examining the strengths and weaknesses of the work of Neyman and Pearson and the Fisher paradigm, the author proposes an alternative paradigm which provides, in the law of likelihood, the explicit concept of evidence missing from the other paradigms. At the same time, this new paradigm retains the elements of objective measurement and control of the frequency of misleading results, features which made the old paradigms so important to science. The likelihood paradigm leads to statistical methods that have a compelling rationale and an elegant simplicity, no longer forcing the reader to choose between frequentist and Bayesian statistics.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Symmetry Measures on Complex Networks" that was published in Symmetry

Large sample techniques are fundamental to all fields of statistics. Mixed effects models, including linear mixed models, generalized linear mixed models, non-linear mixed effects models, and non-parametric mixed effects models are complex models, yet, these models are extensively used in practice. This monograph provides a comprehensive account of asymptotic analysis of mixed effects models. The monograph is suitable for researchers and graduate students who wish to learn about asymptotic tools and research problems in mixed effects models. It may also be used as a reference book for a graduate-level course on mixed effects models, or asymptotic analysis.

Hidden Markov Models for Time Series: An Introduction Using R, Second Edition illustrates the great flexibility of hidden Markov models (HMMs) as general-purpose models for time series data. The book provides a broad understanding of the models and their uses. After presenting the basic model formulation, the book covers estimation, forecasting, decoding, prediction, model selection, and Bayesian inference for HMMs. Through examples and applications, the authors describe how to extend and generalize the basic model so that it can be applied in a rich variety of situations. The book demonstrates how HMMs can be applied to a wide range of types of time series: continuous-valued, circular, multivariate, binary, bounded and unbounded counts, and categorical observations. It also discusses how to employ the freely available computing environment R to carry out the computations. Features Presents an accessible overview of HMMs Explores a variety of applications in ecology, finance, epidemiology, climatology, and sociology Includes numerous theoretical and programming exercises Provides most of the analysed data sets online New to the second edition A total of five chapters on extensions, including HMMs for longitudinal data, hidden semi-Markov models and models with continuous-valued state process New case studies on animal movement, rainfall occurrence and capture-recapture data

This is the second edition of a monograph on generalized linear models with random effects that extends the classic work of McCullagh and Nelder. It has been thoroughly updated, with around 80 pages added, including new material on the extended likelihood approach that strengthens the theoretical basis of the methodology, new developments in variable selection and multiple testing, and new examples and applications. It includes an R package for all the methods and examples that supplement the book.