报告人：Michael Evans (Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto)

时 间：2026年05月18日(周一) 下午 14:00-16:00

地 点：良乡校区 理学楼B栋203-204会议室

摘要：

One can argue that one of the main roles of the subject of statistics is to characterize what the evidence in the collected data says about questions of scientific interest. There are two broad questions that we will refer to as the estimation question and the hypothesis assessment question. For estimation, the evidence in the data should determine a particular value of an object of interest together with a measure of the accuracy of the estimate, while for the hypothesis assessment, the evidence in the data should provide evidence in favor of or against some hypothesized value of the object of interest together with a measure of the strength of the evidence. This will be referred to as the evidential approach to statistical reasoning, which can be contrasted with the behavioristic or decision-theoretic approach where the notion of loss is introduced, and the goal is to minimize expected losses. While the two approaches often lead to similar outcomes, this is not always the case, and it is commonly argued that the evidential approach is more suited to scientific applications. This talk traces the history of the evidential approach and summarizes current developments.

简历：

Michael Evans is a Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Toronto. His work is concerned with establishing a foundation for statistical reasoning based on characterizing statistical evidence. The associated theory is known as relative belief theory. Relative belief theory establishes a unification between frequentist and Bayesian statistics: frequentism addresses the problem of design to ensure the reliability of inferences, while Bayes plays the key role in determining what the actual inferences are for given data. Evans has also developed methods for dealing with the subjective aspects of statistical reasoning through model checking and checking for prior-data conflict.

联系方式：jiangwei.shang@bit.edu.cn

邀请人： 尚江伟

网 址：http://physics.bit.edu.cn/

承办单位：物理学院、先进光电量子结构设计与测量教育部重点实验室