You may be familiar with the long-running divide between Classical or Frequentist (a.k.a. Neyman-Pearson) and Bayesian statisticians. (If not, here’s a simplistic overview.) The schism is being smoothed over, and many statisticians I know are pragmatists who feel free to use either approach depending on the problem at hand.
However, when I read Gerard van Belle’s Statistical Rules of Thumb, I was surprised by his brief mention of three distinct schools of inference: Neyman-Pearson, Bayesian, and Likelihood. I hadn’t heard of the third, so I followed van Belle’s reference to Michael Oakes’ book Statistical Inference: A Commentary for the Social and Behavioural Sciences.
Why should you care what school of inference you use? Well, it’s a framework that guides how you think about science: this includes the methods you choose to use and, crucially, how you interpret your results. Many Frequentist methods have a Bayesian analogue that will give the same numerical result on any given dataset, but the implications you can draw are quite different. Frequentism is the version taught traditionally in Stat101, but if you show someone the results of your data analysis, most people’s interpretation will be closer to the Bayesian interpretation than the Frequentist. So I was curious how “Likelihood inference” compares to these other two.
Below I summarize what I learned from Oakes about Likelihood inference. I close with some good points from the rest of Oakes’ book, which is largely about the misuse of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) and a suggestion to publish effect size estimates instead.
