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Record W7116726263 · doi:10.1080/00031305.2025.2606079

Probabilistic Parameter Estimates that Require Less Small Print

2025· article· en· W7116726263 on OpenAlex
James A. Hanley

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe American Statistician · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsProbabilistic logicEstimation theoryStatistical modelEstimationBayesian probability

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Although we have had nearly a century to refine it, our teaching of confidence intervals for parameters is still imperfect. Despite all of our warnings regarding these intervals, it is not uncommon for end-users to mis-interpret them. We discuss some possible reasons for this, and using a printed figure and a Shiny app, work through a simple and close-to-home example while trying to avoid many of these traps. We urge teachers to (a) begin with contexts that require less technical knowledge, or where the technical details can be kept out of the way (b) avoid the traditional (and symmetric) ‘point estimate ± a z- or t-based margin of error’ confidence intervals that lead to lazy and muddled thinking (c) start with a direct approach – rather than an indirect frequentist one that can end up being misinterpreted and (d) encourage the reverse logic that asks what parameter values might have produced the data we see, rather than what data values will be produced by a parameter value.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.009
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.282
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.009
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.110
GPT teacher head0.395
Teacher spread0.286 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it