David Bickel, statistician

D. R. Bickel, “Confidence distributions applied to propagating uncertainty to inference based on estimating the local false discovery rate: A fiducial continuum from confidence sets to empirical Bayes set estimates as the number of comparisons increases,” Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods 46, 10788-10799 (2017). Published article | Free access (limited time) | 2014 preprint

Two problems confronting the eclectic approach to statistics result from its lack of a unifying theoretical foundation. First, there is typically no continuity between a p-value reported as a level of evidence for a hypothesis in the absence of the information needed to estimate a relevant prior on one hand and an estimated posterior probability of a hypothesis reported in the presence of such information on the other hand. Second, the empirical Bayes methods recommended do not propagate the uncertainty due to estimating the prior.

The latter problem is addressed by applying a coherent form of fiducial inference to hierarchical models, yielding empirical Bayes set estimates that reflect uncertainty in estimating the prior. Plugging in the maximum likelihood estimator, while not propagating that uncertainty, provides continuity from single comparisons to large numbers of comparisons.