Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] statistical inference

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, Jonathan King wrote:

> On 6/5/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
> > >
> > > This problem is obviously important to ecology and is well studied: 
> > > http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/EstimateS.  Chao's work on this is quite 
> > > brilliant, but is essentially ad-hoc.  I tried a Baysian approach, 
> > > and its dependence upon priors is tremendous, and in any case it 
> > > always seem to estimate too high.
> >
> > I think a Bayesian approach is very reasonable for a problem like this 
> > one.  If it gives answers that appear incorrect, change the prior.
>
> OK, so I think *this* is the difference between a mathematician like 
> Stephen and people like Mike and I who can't go running away screaming 
> from the data when there's a problem.  We shrug and say, "well, let's 
> try something else".  For somebody like Stephen, a statement like "well, 
> just try another prior" must seem horribly unprincipled.


;-)

Well, science is messy and you have to do something!  There will never be 
anything in science that is as tidy as anything in mathematics.  I think 
the two tidiness distributions don't even overlap.

Mike

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