Vassend, Olav and Sober, Elliott and Fitelson, Branden (2017) The Philosophical Significance of Stein's Paradox. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Charles Stein discovered a paradox in 1955 that many statisticians think is of
fundamental importance. Here we explore its philosophical implications. We outline the nature of Stein’s result and of subsequent work on shrinkage estimators; then we describe how these results are related to Bayesianism and to model selection criteria like the Akaike Information Criterion. We also discuss their bearing on scientific realism and instrumentalism. We argue that results concerning shrinkage estimators underwrite a surprising form of holistic pragmatism.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Vassend, Olav vassend@ntu.edu.sg Sober, Elliott ersober@wisc.edu Fitelson, Branden branden@fitelson.org
Keywords:	Stein's paradox; shrinkage estimators;MLE; maximum likelihood; Statistical inference; frequentism; Bayesianism
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
Depositing User:	Olav Vassend
Date Deposited:	04 Aug 2017 15:19
Last Modified:	04 Aug 2017 15:19
Item ID:	13303
Official URL:	https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-0...
DOI or Unique Handle:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-016-0168-7
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
Date:	12 January 2017
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/13303

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