Dicing with Death
Chance, Risk and Health
A medical statistician on how evidence about health is produced, and on the schools of inference that disagree about it.
Stephen Senn is a medical statistician, and this is his account of how evidence about health is actually produced, through clinical trials, randomisation and the meaning of a p-value, alongside the philosophical disagreements underneath. He gives the Bayesian and frequentist schools a fair hearing while making clear where he stands, and the history is told through the statisticians themselves.
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David Spiegelhalter
This is the way that you draw conclusions from data about the underlying states of the world. Some of these arguments involve quite deep philosophical issues. For example, “What is probability?” Stephen Senn covers the different schools of statistical inference, including the so-called Bayesian inference, of which I am an enthusiast, as well as that based on [Ronald] Fisher, [Jerzy] Neyman and [Karl] Pearson.
Interview · September 2011
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