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Bayes and Particle Physics

I have just read a very nice paper on how badly confidence levels are interpreted as Probabilities of events in Particle Physics:


  • Probably a discovery: Bad mathematics means rough scientific communication  by G. D'Agostini

It explains well how the Frequentist hypothesis-test language can be misleading, to say the least. To be honest, it's amazing how after so many examples of how the Bayesian (although it should be called Laplacian) reasoning is the correct way of doing probabilistic inference, people still are stubborn enough to reject it by the silliest reasons.

It's extremely simple to see that the frequentist approach is a particular case of the much more general, Bayesian framework (once more, read Jaynes or Sivia). The last arguments I heard were related to quantum mechanics. Some people say that, because probabilities are fundamental on QM, the frequentist framework is the correct one. That's nonsense, of course. QM probabilities are still Bayesian. They give the odds of a result given the preparation of an experiment. Obviously, as always, they coincide with the frequentist calculations in the long run, but still, whenever your quantum state is |+>, you can safely say that the probability of measuring a spin up or down is the same, even if you do only one experiment (not an infinity amount of them). The meaning is simply that you don't have any reason to prefer either result, up or down, in your next measurement.

The important thing to remember is this: frequentists cannot say that your NEXT coin throw have a probability of 1/2 tails and 1/2 heads because that should be meaningless for them (although it can be masked by a lot of tricky justifications). On the opposite hand, that kind of reasoning is totally allowed by Bayesian inference, where it has the simple and intuitive clear meaning that there is no reason to favour either tails or heads.

That should be simple, isn't it? In this case, it is. 


This post first appeared on Skepsisfera, please read the originial post: here

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Bayes and Particle Physics

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