Over the past weeks, I have revised Reading Keynes’ Treatise on Probability and the new version is now arXived (and resubmitted). I have mostly focussed on the presentation of the Treatise within the (then) current scene and on the existing advances missed by Keynes, rather than studying the technical work on the principal averages any further. For the same reason, I also abstained from relating the book to the notion of uncertain probabilities, despite a nice suggestion by Michael Brady, as I felt this was not directly related to the statistical focus of the review.
Archive for John Maynard Keynes
“Reading Keynes” revised
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags A Treatise on Probability, John Maynard Keynes on October 19, 2010 by xi'anreading Keynes [assessed]
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags A Treatise on Probability, Harold Jeffreys, John Maynard Keynes on October 1, 2010 by xi'an
A few days ago, I got the following review of my paper on Keynes’ A Treatise on Probability, review which, while being rather negative, is quite fair.
When I looked at the title, I was expecting a paper that would be of considerable general interest. Now that I have read the paper several times, I am not quite sure what I got out of the paper. While I admire the authors goal, the paper is unfortunately not very informative.. [It] comes across as a collection of disjoint points. Even within sections, the points being made are not cohesive, and the paper does not flow smoothly. Some of this is to be expected from the nature of the paper, as one must select key points to discuss. But the organization has to be better. Also, the material following the quotes do not really embellish on the point in the quote; in fact, sometimes there is no direct connection. Take for instance the first part of Section 2, before 2.1. The quote just sits there the material doesn’t make any connection to it. The main point of the section is in the top para on page 3 but it doesn’t do much. There is a mention on lack of analyses of data but this seems to be a throw-away sentence. Continue reading
Jaynes’ re-read
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags CREST, E.T. Jaynes, Harold Jeffreys, John Maynard Keynes on July 2, 2010 by xi'anFollowing the two past PhD courses on Jeffreys‘ Theory of Probability and Keynes‘ Treatise On Probability, I will propose next year a reading course at CREST on Jaynes’s Probability Theory.
Jeffreys and Jaynes share a lot in common as physicists who both significantly contributed to Bayesian statistical theory and as writers of books with almost identical titles and with very ambitious and similar scopes. It is thus no surprise that Jaynes dedicates his book to Jeffreys. There are also differences, the most obvious one being that Jeffreys published his foundational book before his 50th birthday, while Jaynes’ book came out more than ten years after his death (under the scholarly supervision of Larry Bretthorst). The time difference between both books is not that revelant, however, in that Jaynes’s Probability Theory is what P
ersi Diaconis call “wonderfully out of date” in his review. (Meaning “Jaynes’s focus on basic philosophical issues [rather than on computational techniques] is timeless“, with the conclusion that “this is the best introduction to Bayesian statistics that I know”!)
I plan to cover in the lectures what I consider to be the most significant aspects of Jaynes’s work. The corpus of work corresponding to the logical foundations of probability theory and the opposition of Jaynes to (Feller’s) measure theory, Bourbakism, Kolmogorov’s axioms, (Feller’s) countable additivity, de Finetti’s principles, and other probabilistic paradoxes will not be adressed, even though a second course by a probabilist colleague of mine at Dauphine may follow this one. The lectures will focus on
- the meaning and motivation of prior distributions (Chapter 6), culminating in the definition of the entropy principle (Chapter 11)
- the rules of hypothesis testing (Chapter 4) and the central role of evidence (Chapters 9 and 18)
- the special case of transformation groups (Chapter 12) and the debate about marginalisation paradoxes (Chapter 15)
- Bayesian estimation (Chapter 6) and the criticisms on decision theory (Chapters 13 and 14)
- Model comparison (Chapter 20) and the pathologies of orthodox methods (Chapters 16 and 17)
The dates of the course are already set: March 21, 24, 28, 31 and April 04 [2011]…
Keynes’ review quickly rejected
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags book review, John Maynard Keynes, rejection on April 8, 2010 by xi'an
Yesterday morning, I submitted my review of Keynes’ A Treatise On Probability to Statistica Sinica and I got a rejection reply with the reason
(X) narrowly focused and the readership is likely to be very limited.
this morning. Fine, I understand the point and appreciate the quick return (even though I now worry about the overall publishability of the review).
arXives
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags A Treatise on Probability, Annals of Statistics, arXiv, Bayesian Analysis, John Maynard Keynes, Krzysztof Burdzy, The Search for Certainty on March 31, 2010 by xi'anYesterday, I finally arXived my notes on Keynes’ book A Treatise On Probability, but, due to the new way the arXiv website operates, there is no indication of the page associated with the submitted paper before it gets accepted and I cannot thus prepare an Og’ entry until this acceptance, wasting perfect timing! Anyway, this is the first draft of the notes and it has not yet been submitted to a journal. As the new user interface on the arXiv webpage now displays all past papers, I added a category on our 2007 Annals paper with Randal Douc, Arnaud Guillin and Jean-Michel Marin, which means it appeared again in today’s list…
Today I completed my revision of the review of Burdzy’s The Search for Certainty over for Bayesian Analysis, so the new version will be on arXiv tomorrow morning. The changes are really minor as Bayesian Analysis mostly requested smoothing down my criticisms. I also added a few more quotes and some sentences in the conclusion. I wonder if this paper will appear with a discussion, since three are already written!
At last, let me point out three recent interesting postings on arXiv if I do not have time to discuss them more in depth, one by Peter Green on Colouring and breaking sticks: random distributions and heterogeneous clustering, one by Nicolas Chopin, Tony Lelièvre et Gabriel Stolz on Free energy methods for efficient exploration of mixture posterior densities, and one by Sophie Donnet and Jean-Michel Marin on An empirical Bayes procedure for the selection of Gaussian graphical models.
