Book Details

Model Based Inference in the Life Sciences: A Primer on Evidence

Publication year: 2008

ISBN: 978-0-387-74075-1

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The abstract concept of "information" can be quantified and this has led to many important advances in the analysis of data in the empirical sciences. This text focuses on a science philosophy based on "multiple working hypotheses" and statistical models to represent them. The fundamental science question relates to the empirical evidence for hypotheses in this set—a formal strength of evidence. Kullback-Leibler information is the information lost when a model is used to approximate full reality. Hirotugu Akaike found a link between K-L information (a cornerstone of information theory) and the maximized log-likelihood (a cornerstone of mathematical statistics). This combination has become the basis for a new paradigm in model based inference. The text advocates formal inference from all the hypotheses/models in the a priori set—multimodel inference.


Subject: Mathematics and Statistics, Akaike’s information criterion AIC, Master Patient Index, Model based inference, Quantitative evidence, Statistical Inference, information theory, mathematical statistics, multimodel inference, statistics