David Bickel, statistician

D. R. Bickel, “Resolving conflicts between statistical methods by probability combination: Application to empirical Bayes analyses of genomic data,” Technical Report, Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology, arXiv:1111.6174 (2011). Full preprint

This paper proposes a solution to the problem of combining the results of differing statistical methods that may legitimately be used to analyze the same data set. The motivating application is the combination of two estimators of the probability of differential gene expression: one uses an empirical null distribution, and the other uses the theoretical null distribution. Since there is usually not any reliable way to predict which null distribution will perform better for a given data set and since the choice between them often has a large impact on the conclusions, the proposed hedging strategy addresses a pressing need in statistical genomics. Many other applications are also mentioned in the abstract and described in the introduction.