Abstract for a seminar: “Big Data” is more than a slogan; it is our modern world in which we learn by combining information from diverse sources of varying quality. But traditional statistical questions—how to generalize from sample to population, how to compare groups that differ, and whether a given data pattern can be explained by noise—continue to arise. Often a big-data study will be summarized by a little p-value. Recent developments in psychology and elsewhere make it clear that our usual statistical prescriptions, adapted as they were to a simpler world of agricultural experiments and random-sample surveys, fail badly and repeatedly in the modern world in which millions of research papers are published each year. Can Bayesian inference help us out of this mess? Maybe, but much research will be needed to get to that point. More......
