Comment: The First Data Analysis Should be Journalistic: Fid-Bau Portal

Comment: The First Data Analysis Should be Journalistic

Edwards, Don

Bayesian statistical methods can be considered an attempt at mathematical formalization of the natural scientific process of interpretation of data in light of preexisting information. As such, their use, and the degree to which they are used, is largely a question of efficiency. In some instances it may be appropriate to incorporate prior information into an analysis to the extent that this information is deemed reliable by all concerned; it will not often be the case in an ecological study, however, that information satisfying these constraints is substantial. In the most important distributional setting a frequentist confidence interval is identical to a noninformative Bayesian credible interval, and it is asserted that in most other cases where noninformative priors are used, these two will be very similar; the primary data analysis in an ecological study should probably be of one of these two forms. It is conjectured that, in order to be mathematically tractable, decision theoretic methods (Bayesian or not) will often deal with a dangerously short action‐space time frame. Finally, Empirical Bayesian methods and hierarchical models in general are powerful new methods that should be used, with caution, to the extent that their superstructural assumptions are reliable.