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When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian?
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1 Bayesian Analysis (2006) 1, Number 1, pp When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? Stephen E. Fienberg Abstract. While Bayes theorem has a 250-year history, and the method of inverse probability that flowed from it dominated statistical thinking into the twentieth century, the adjective Bayesian was not part of the statistical lexicon until relatively recently. This paper provides an overview of key Bayesian developments, beginning with Bayes posthumously published 1763 paper and continuing up through approximately 1970, including the period of time when Bayesian emerged as the label of choice for those who advocated Bayesian methods. Keywords: Bayes Theorem; Classical statistical methods; Frequentist methods; Inverse probability; Neo-Bayesian revival; Stigler s Law of Eponymy; Subjective probability. 1 Introduction What s in a name? It all depends, especially on the nature of the entity being named, but when it comes to statistical methods, names matter a lot. Whether the name is eponymous (as in Pearson s chi-square statistic 1, Student s t-test, Hotelling s T 2 statistic, the Box-Cox transformation, the Rasch model, and the Kaplan-Meier statistic) or generic (as in correlation coefficient or p-value) or even whimsical (as in the jackknife 2 or the bootstrap 3 ), names in the statistical literature often signal the adoption of new statistical ideas or shifts in the acceptability of statistical methods and approaches. 4 Today statisticians speak and write about Bayesian statistics and frequentist or classical statistical methods, and there is even a journal of Bayesian Analysis, but few appear to know where the descriptors Bayesian and frequentist came from or how they arose in the history of their field. This paper is about the adjective Bayesian 5 and its adoption by the statistical community to describe a set of inferential methods based directly on the use of Bayes Theorem, which is now thought of by many as an elementary result in probability Department of Statistics,Cylab, and Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1 Many authors take great pride in having an eponymous method in their lifetime, but this was insufficient for Karl Pearson. See Porter (127, Chapter 1). 2 Named by John Tukey after the boy scout s trusty knife. 3 Coined by Bradley Efron by reference to the tales of the adventures of Baron Munchausen, who rescued himself from drowning in a lake by picking himself up by his own bootstraps. 4 Kasner and Newman (90) noted: We can get along without new names until, as we advance in science, we acquire new ideas and new forms. 5 Bayesian is also now used as a noun, as in a Bayesian, i.e., a person who thinks it makes sense to treat observables as random variables and to assign probability distributions to them. Such usage followed the adoption of Bayesian as an adjective. c 2006 International Society for Bayesian Analysis ba0001
2 2 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? theory and where probabilities are typically taken to be subjective or logical. The paper is not about the question Who discovered Bayes Theorem?, an issue related to the emergence of statistical thinking some 250 years ago, and one evoking references to Stigler s Law of Eponymy 6. Indeed, Stigler (158) has addressed this question himself, as have others such as Dale (36) and Bellhouse (16). Rather, my focus is on the emergence of the adjective Bayesian as associated with inferential methods in the middle of the twentieth century to describe what has been referred to up to that point as the method of inverse probability. Why did the change occur? To whom should the term and its usage be attributed? What was the impact of the activities surrounding the adoption of the adjective Bayesian? Why do many statisticians now refer to themselves as Bayesian? 7 These are some of the questions I plan to address. Aldrich (2) covers some closely related territory but with a different focus and perspective. The task of investigating the usage of names was once quite daunting, but the recently-developed fully-searchable electronic archives such as JSTOR have made the task of exploring word usage far simpler than it once was, at least for English language statistical literature. Nonetheless, usage occurs in books and oral presentations, as well as in informal professional communications, and a search for terms like Bayesian in only electronic journal archives, while informative, would be unlikely to answer the key question I want to address. Pieces of the beginning of my story have been chronicled in different forms in the histories by Dale (36), Hald (82), Porter (126), and Stigler (159; 161), but these otherwise wonderful sources do not answer the key question that gives its name to the title of this paper. I began asking these questions several years ago (e.g., see Fienberg (58)) as a result of conversations with a social historian collaborator about the origin of methods for census adjustment. I had the good fortune to be able to confer with several distinguished statisticians who participated in some key events which I will describe, and their recollections (e.g., see Lindley (106)) have contributed to the answers I provide here. In the next two sections, I trace some of the history of Bayesian ideas, from the time of Bayes and Laplace through to the twentieth century. In Section 4, I turn to the developments of the first half of the twentieth century, both Bayesian and otherwise, since they set the stage for the neo-bayesian revival. In section 5, I explain what is known about the use of adjective Bayesian, and I outline the dimensions of Bayesian creativity that surrounded its emergence during a period I call the neo-bayesian revival. In the final sections of the paper, I focus briefly on some of the sequelae to the neo- 6 Stigler s Law in its simplest form states that [n]o scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. For those who have not previously seen references to this law, it is worth noting that Stigler proposed it in the spirit of a self-proving theorem. (156) 7 A reviewer of an earlier version of this article observed that this is a decidedly English-language, and perhaps uninteresting, question. Making adjectives out of nouns was perhaps more common in German than in English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the adjective Bayessche was used; however, der Bayesschen Satz in Kolmogorov s Grundbegriffe (93, p. 36) is just a theorem about events and not Bayesian in the sense that I use it here (c.f. Aldrich, in Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics, Moreover, while there may not be much apparent difference between Bayes rule and Bayesian rule, the adoption of the adjective in English occurred during a remarkable period of intellectual ferment and marked the rise of the modern Bayesian movement in a predominantly English-language literature.
3 Stephen E. Fienberg 3 Bayesian revival of the 1950s and especially during the 1960s. Today, Bayesian methods are integrated into both the fabric of statistical thinking within the field of statistics and the methodology used in a broad array of applications. The ubiquity of Bayesian statistics is illustrated by the name of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, its growing membership, and its new on-line journal. But one can also see the broad influence of Bayesian thinking by a quick scan of major journals of not only statistics but also computer science and bioinformatics, economics, medicine, and even physics, to name specific fields. This paper is far from an exhaustive treatment of the subject, for that would have taken a book. Rather, I have chosen to cite a few key contributions as part of the historical development, especially as they relate to the theme of the adjective Bayesian. I cite many (but not all) relevant books and a small fraction of the papers that were part of the development of Bayesian inference. 2 Bayes Theorem My story begins, of course, with the Reverend Thomas Bayes, 8 a nonconformist English minister whose 1763 posthumously published paper, An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, (14) contains what is arguably the first detailed description of the theorem from elementary probability theory now associated with his name. Bayes paper, which was submitted for publication by Richard Price, is remarkably opaque in its notation and details, and the absence of integral signs makes for difficult reading to those of us who have come to expect them. The Essay considers the problem, Given the number of times in which an unknown event has happened and failed: Required the chance that the probability of its happening in a single trial lies somewhere between any two degrees of probability that can be named. [p. 376] Writing in an unpublished 1960 reading note, L.J. Savage (141) observed: The problem is of the kind we now associate with Bayes s name, but it is confined from the outset to the special problem of drawing the Bayesian inference, not about an arbitrary sort of parameter, but about a degree of probability only. This statement actually provides us with the first clue to the title of this article; clearly in 1960, Savage was using the term Bayesian as we do today. And he notes what others have subsequently: that Bayes did not actually give us a statement of Bayes Theorem, either in its discrete form, P (B i A) = P (A B i)p (B i ) j P (A B j)p (B j ), (1) (this came later in Laplace (96)), or in its continuous form with integration, although he solved a special case of the latter. In current statistical language, Bayes paper introduces a uniform prior distribution on the binomial parameter, 9 θ, reasoning by analogy with a billiard table and drawing 8 For biographical material on Bayes see Bellhouse (16) and Dale (37). 9 Of course Bayes didn t use the term parameter David and Edwards (41) trace the introduction
4 4 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? on the form of the marginal distribution of the binomial random variable, and not on the principle of insufficient reason, as many others have claimed. 10 An appendix to the paper, written by Price, also deals with the related problem of predicting the result of a new observation. Bellhouse (15) suggests that Price contributed more to Bayes essay than others have hitherto suggested, perhaps even piecing it together from a number of initially seemingly unrelated results to form a coherent whole. Both Bellhouse and Stigler have also suggested that the famous portrait of Bayes that adorns a myriad of publications about him and all things Bayesian may actually not be Bayes at all (see (122))! Stigler (158) has also explored the question of whether Bayes did indeed discover Bayes Theorem, and points to paragraphs in a 1749 book by David Hartley that give a concise description of the inverse result and attribute it to a friend, whom Stigler infers was likely Nicholas Saunderson, but if so he apparently did not publish the details. Hald (82) argues that the friend might actually have been Bayes and that the result was developed before the publication of Hartley s book. Dale (37) reproduces an undated notebook of Bayes with a passage which he suggests comes from about , thus supporting the thesis that Bayes might have been the unnamed friend of Hartley. Would we call Bayes a Bayesian today? Stigler (157) argues that Bayes intended his results in a rather more limited way than would modern Bayesians. But Stigler also notes that Bayes definition of probability is subjective, and a 2003 version of the entry on Thomas Bayes in the online Wikipedia Encyclopedia entry on suggested that we interpret it in terms of expected utility (had Bayes only understood the concept!), and thus that Bayes result would make sense only to the extent to which one can bet on its observable consequences. But perhaps it would be fairer to Bayes to see what ideas unfolded in the two centuries following his death before probing more deeply into how he viewed the matter! Nonetheless this commentary on Bayes raises anew the issue of why we call Bayesian methods Bayesian. 3 Inverse Probability From Bayes to the Twentieth Century Whether or not Bayes actually discovered Bayes Theorem, it seems clear that his work preceded that of Pierre Simon Laplace, the eighteenth century French scientist who, in his 1774 paper, Mémoire sur la Probabilité des Causes par les Évènements, gave a much more elaborate version of the inference problem for the unknown binomial parameter in relatively modern language and notation. Laplace also articulated, more clearly than Bayes, his argument for the choice of a uniform prior distribution, arguing that the posterior distribution of the parameter θ should be proportional to what we of the term to a 1903 book by Kapteyn (89). Then in 1922 Fisher (62) reintroduced the term and the label took hold. For modern Bayesians, parameters are simply random variables and so it is natural to put distributions on them. 10 See Stigler (157), who draws attention to this marginal distribution argument in the Scholium that follows the key proposition in Bayes paper.
5 Stephen E. Fienberg 5 now call the likelihood of the data, i.e., f(θ x 1, x 2,..., x n ) f(x 1, x 2,..., x n θ). (2) We now understand that this implies that the prior distribution for θ is uniform, although in general, of course, the prior may not exist. The paper also contains other major statistical innovations, such as picking an estimate that minimizes the posterior loss. For further details, see Stigler (160). Laplace refined and developed the Principle he introduced in 1774 in papers published in 1781 and 1786, and it took on varing forms such as the indifference principle or what we now refer to as Laplace s Rule of Succession (for obtaining the probability of new events on the basis of past observations). But the original 1774 memoir had far-reaching influence on the adoption of Bayesian ideas in the mathematical world, influence that was unmatched by Bayes paper, to which it did not refer. 11 Ultimately, Laplace and others recognized Bayes prior claim (e.g., see Condorcet s introduction to Laplace s 1781 paper, and the final section of Laplace s 1812 monograph (97), Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, and the related discussion in Dale (36), p. 249). Condorcet (33) used a form probabilistic reasoning attributed to Bayes and Laplace in his famous work on majority voting, as did his student Lacroix (95) in his probability text. Laplace s introduction of the notion of indifference as an argument in specifying a prior distribution was first in a long line of efforts to discover the statistical holy grail: prior distributions reflecting ignorance. The search for the holy grail continues today under a variety of names, including objective Bayes, and in response to every method that is put forward we see papers about logical and statistical inconsistencies or improprieties. Another surprise to some is that Laplace s 1774 paper does not use the term inverse probability; the phrase came into use later. For example, De Morgan (47) wrote about the method of inverse probability and attributed its general form to Laplace s 1812 book (97) inverse because it involves inferring backwards from the data to the parameter or from effects to causes. The term continued in use until the mid-twentieth century. It was only later that others argued that Laplace had not noticed that inverting the conditioning changed the meaning of probability (c.f. the narrative in Howie (85)). Laplace s 1812 formulation of the large sample normal probability approximation for the binomial parameter with a uniform (beta) prior was generalized by I.J. Bienaymé (17) to linear functions of multinomial parameters, again with a uniform prior on the multinomial. In essence, he was working with a special case of the Dirichlet prior. Heyde and Seneta (83, pp ) give a detailed description of Bienaymé s formulation and approach in modern notation and they note that a rigorous proof of the result was provided in the twentieth century by von Mises See Stigler (160) for a discussion of why Laplace was unaware of Bayes paper when he wrote this 1774 paper. 12 Results similar to this one by Bienaymé are used today to justfy frequentist interpretations of Bayesian interval estimates. It is in this sense that Bienaymé was clearly before his time, as the title of (83) suggests.
6 6 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? According to Daston (38), [B]etween 1837 and 1843 at least six authors Siméon- Denis Poisson, Bernard Bolzano, Robert Leslie Ellis, Jacob Friedrich Fries, John Stuart Mill, and [Antoine Augustine] Counot approaching the topic as mathematicians, writing in French, German, and English, and apparently working independently made similar distinctions between the probabilities of things and the probabilities of our beliefs about things. This is the distinction between what we now call objective and subjective meanings of probability. Cournot (35), for example, sharply criticized Condorcet s and Laplace s approach to the probabilities of causes (see Daston (38) for a detailed discussion of what all of these authors meant by these terms). This focus on the meaning of probability quickly spread to other countries as well. The links between France and Russia were especially strong as Seneta (150) notes and, while the work in Russia influenced the formal development of probability in the twentieth century in profound ways, 13 it seems to have had limited impact at the time on the development of subjective probability and related statistical methods. This is not to suggest that the developments in probability were devoid of statistical content. For example, Bienaymé in 1853 and Chebyshev in 1867, in proofs of what is most commonly know as as the Chebyshev inequality, independently set out what could be thought of as the Method of Moments (e.g., see Heyde and Seneta (83, pp )). But both authors were primarily interested in forms of the Law of Large Numbers and not problems of statistical inference per se. It was Karl Pearson, decades later, who set forth the method in the context of inferential problems and actual data. The connection of these developments to inverse probability is, however, somewhat muddy. Mathematicians and philosophers continued to debate the meaning of probability throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. For example, Boole, Venn, Chrystal, and others argued that the inverse method was incompatible with objective probabilities, and they also critiqued the inverse method because of its use of indifference prior distributions. But when it came to the practical application of statistical ideas for inferential purposes, inverse probability ruled the day (c.f. Zabell (181; 182)). 14 This was largely because no one came forward with a systematic and implementable frequentist alternative. For example, Fechner (55) studied frequency distributions and introduced the term Kollektivmasslehre collective later used by von Mises in his frequentist approach. But, as Sheynin (153) notes, his description was vague and general in nature. Thus, in retrospect, it shouldn t be surprising to see inverse probability as the method of choice of the great English statisticians of the turn of the century, such as Edgeworth and Pearson. For example, Edgeworth (49) gave one of the earliest derivations of what we now know as Student s t-distribution, the posterior distribution of the mean µ of a normal distribution given uniform prior distributions on µ and h = σ 1, calling it the subexponential distribution. This is another instance of Stigler s Law, since Gosset, publishing under the pseudonym Student, gave his version of the derivation 13 For example, see the discussion about the evolution of ideas in probability in Shafer and Vovk (151). 14 For example, according to Sheynin (152), Markov used a variation on an argument of Laplace to demonstrate an early robustness argument with regard to prior distributions in the binomial setting.
7 Stephen E. Fienberg 7 in 1908 (163), without reference to Edgeworth (c.f. Stigler (155)). Gosset s exposition does not directly mention inverse probability, but it is reasonably clear to anyone who reads his subsequent paper on the correlation coefficient, published the same year, that this was the implicit reasoning (see Fienberg and Lazar (60)). Of course, today we also know that the result was derived even earlier, by Lüroth in 1876, who also used inverse probability methods (see Pfanzagl and Sheynin (125)). Gosset worked at Guinness Brewery in Dublin, but did the work on the t-distribution and the correlation coefficient in Karl Pearson s Statistical Laboratory at University College London. Beginning in his Grammar of Science (123), Pearson adopted the Laplace version of inverse probability, but he also argued for the role of experience in determining the a priori probabilities. In Pearson (124), he again wrote about assuming the truth of Bayes Theorem, and went on to discuss the importance of past experience. This is an approach which, when implemented decades later, came to be known as empirical Bayes. But, as Jeffreys noted much later on when describing Pearson s position, [t]he anomalous feature of his work is that though he always maintained the principle of inverse probability... he seldom used it in actual applications, and usually presented his results in a form that appears to identify a probability with a frequency. (87, p. 383) It should come as no surprise to us therefore that those like Gosset, on whom Pearson exerted such a strong influence, would use inverse probability implicitly or explicitly. Yet later, Gosset would gladly assume the mantle of frequentist methods advocated by R. A. Fisher, although he, like most other statisticians, found issues on which he and Fisher disagreed quite strongly From Inverse Probability to Frequentism and the Rise of Subjective Probability 4.1 Frequentist Alternatives to Inverse Probability At the time that Ronald Alymer Fisher began his studies of statistics at Cambridge in 1909, inverse probability was an integral part of the subject he learned (c.f. Edwards (50)). Frequentist and other non-bayesian ideas were clearly in the air, but it is difficult to know to what extent Fisher was aware of them. For example, as a student he might have been led to read papers and books dealing with such alternatives by his teacher, F.J.M. Stratton, but he rarely cited relevant precursors or alternatives to his own work (see Aldrich s (1) account of what Fisher studied). Over a period of Fienberg and Lazar (60) provide support for this interpretation of Gosset as using inverse probability. A reviewer of an earlier version of this paper has argued that Gosset was simply not clear about these matters and that his later acceptance of Fisher s interpretation of inference was not foreordained. But such an argument misses the fact that there was no comprehensive statistical alternative to inverse probability at the time Gosset wrote his 1908 papers and thus we should expect to see the role of inverse probability in his work.
8 8 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? years, from 1912 to 1922, Fisher moved away from the inverse methods and towards his own approach to inference he called the likelihood, a concept he claimed was distinct from probability. But Fisher s progression in this regard was slow. Stigler (162) has pointed out that, in an unpublished manuscript dating from 1916, Fisher didn t distinguish between likelihood and inverse probability with a flat prior, even though when he later made the distinction he claimed to have understood it at this time. But within six years Fisher s thinking had a broad new perspective, and his 1922 paper (62) was to revolutionize modern statistical thinking. In it, he not only introduced likelihood and its role in producing maximum likelihood estimates, but he also gave us the statistical notions of sufficiency and efficiency and used the label parameter, which was to become the object of scientific inquiry (c.f. Stigler (162)). Later he moved even further and developed his own approach to inverse reasoning which he dubbed the fiducial method (64), and went so far as to suggest that Gosset s interpretation of his t-distribution result was in the fiducial spirit. Fisher also gave statistics the formal methodology of tests of significance, especially through his 1925 book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers (63). Fisher s work had a profound influence on two other young statisticians working in Pearson s laboratory at University College London: Jerzy Neyman, a Polish statistician whose early work focused on experiments and sample surveys, and Egon Pearson, Karl Pearson s son. They found Fisher s ideas on significance tests lacking in mathematical detail and, together, they set out to extend and complete what he had done. In the process, they developed the methods of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals that were to revolutionize both the theory and the application of statistics. Although Fisher often disagreed with them caustically and vigorously both orally and in print (e.g., see Fienberg and Tanur (61)), some amalgam of their approaches referred to later as frequentist methods soon supplanted inverse probability. The mathematical foundation for these methods emerged from Russia and the axiomatic work of Kolmogorov (93). The methods quickly spread to diverse areas of application, for good and for bad. Gigerenzer et al. (69) describe the impact of these frequentist methods especially in psychology. I would be remiss if I didn t also mention the work of Richard von Mises (168) on frequentist justifications for probability, but his work had remarkably little influence on the course of the development of statistical methods and theory despite its seeming importance to philosophers. In his 1941 paper on the foundations of probability and statistics, however, von Mises (169) uses a Bayesian argument to critique the Neyman method of confidence intervals. While he suggested that what one really wanted was the posterior distribution, the estimation challenge was saying something about it without having information about the prior probability, a theme he elaborated on in von Mises (170). The adjective frequentist, like the adjective Bayesian, is now widely used, but it was uncommon in the early days of Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson. A search of JSTOR shows that its earliest use in the main English language statistical journals occurred in a 1936 article by Nagel (119); his focus was largely on the frequency interpretation of probability. The adjective appeared again sporadically in philosophy and statistics journals for the next 20 years, but the use of frequentist to describe statistical methods
9 Stephen E. Fienberg 9 gained currency in the 1950s only after Bayesian came into common usage, and then it was used by Bayesians to describe non-bayesian methods. 16 Abraham Wald used Bayesian ideas and the name Bayes throughout his development of statistical decision theory, albeit in a decidedly non-bayesian or frequentist form. Wald (172) considered hypothetical a priori distributions of the parameter of interest, and in 1947 (173) he derived the Bayes solution, but then evaluated its performance with respect to the sample space. The basic idea in all of this work was that the use of Bayesian tools led to good frequentist properties. Later literature renamed other quantities in Wald s 1939 paper using Bayes as a descriptor. Writing in 1953 as a discussant to a paper by Dennis Lindley (100), George Barnard was to remark that Wald helped to rescue Bayes theorem from the obscurity into which it had been driven in recent years. 4.2 The Rise of Subjective Probability Of course, inverse probability ideas did not die with the rise of likelihood methods and tests of hypotheses. John Maynard Keynes (91) described the view of subjective probability in the early 1920s in his Treatise on Probability, but in doing so he allowed for the possibility that degree of belief might not be numerically measurable. While Keynes bibliography ran some 25 pages and made clear that he was drawing on a broad literature, in other senses it signaled a major break from past, in large part because of the new literature it triggered. 17 In his review of Keynes book, Émile Borel (21) clearly identified the issues associated with the meaning of probability and articulated what Savage was to refer to as the earliest account of the modern concept of personal probability known to me. 18 Five years later, Frank Ramsey (132) critiqued 16 The term classical statistics, used to describe frequentist as opposed to Bayesian methods, came later, and perhaps it owes itself to Neyman s 1937 paper (121), Outline of a Theory of Statistical Estimation Based on the Classical Theory of Probability. Neyman used the adjective classical to distinguish his approach from Jeffreys and suggested that his approach was rooted in the traditional approach to probability based on equally likely cases or the more formal versions developed in the twentieth century by the French and Russian statisticians Borel, Fréchet, Kolmogorov, and Lévy. In the process he in some senses usurped the label and applied it to his approach with Egon Pearson. This usage of classical in an inference context is an oxymoron, since if anything should be called classical it should be methods descended from inverse probability. Wilks (178) used the phrase classical probability in describing sampling distributions in the context of confidence interval calculations the previous year in his discussion of Nagel (119), so again the use of the label applied to inference methods was in the air. Various authors have of course used the label classical to refer to methods from the past. But what is clear from a search of JSTOR is that classical inference, classical statistical inference, and classical statistics came into vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, especially by Bayesians to describe non-bayesian frequentist methodology associated with the Neyman-Pearson school. Barnett (13) has a chapter in the first edition of his comparative inference book on classical inference. 17 A reviewer criticized an earlier version of this paper as being Anglo-centric. But the literature that we now label as Bayesian, with a few notable exceptions, became dominated by English-speaking authors whose sources typically did not include the diverse array of references which Keynes cited. This is not to argue that Keynes and those who followed him were not influenced by the French school, but rather that the French literature stopped far short of providing the foundation on which modern Bayesian thinking now rests. 18 See the comment in the bibliographic supplement to the paperback edition of Savage (140). A referee has pointed to similar interpretations in Paul Lévy s 1925 book on probability (98), although
10 10 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? Keyne s axiomatic formulation and he laid out a new approach to subjective probability through the concept of expected utility. Both Ramsey and Keynes were influenced by their Cambridge colleague William Ernest Johnson, whose early work on the Dirichlet priors for the multinomial is an antecedent to I.J. Good s (77) approach for hierarchical Bayesian inference (see the discussion in Zabell (180)). In an objective inverse probability vein, Ernest Lhoste (99) published a series of four articles comprising about 92 pages that appeared respectively in the May August 1923 issues of the Revue D artillerie in Paris. While some of this work was descriptive in nature, in the second article, arguing for a form of indifference in the spirit of Laplace, he developed vague prior distributions that represent little or no knowledge for the mean and variance of a normal distribution and for the probability of success for the binomial distribution. His results and reasoning were similar to those of Jeffreys (87) for the normal distribution and to those of Haldane for the binomial almost a decade later. Lhoste reasons that the prior density for the standard deviation, σ, should be the same as that for its reciprocal, and he sets f(σ) 1/σ for σ > 0. (3) Thus he argues that lack of knowledge about σ should be the same as our lack of knowledge about 1/σ. This is similar to Jeffreys (1961, page 119) invariance principle that states that prior information about σ should be the same as that for any power of σ. Broemeling and Broemeling (28) paraphrase Lhoste: nothing distinguishes, a priori, 1/σ from σ; if σ is indeterminate between two values, then 1/σ will be equally and in the same fashion indeterminate between the corresponding values of 1/σ. Thus what we now call Jeffreys prior appears to be another instance of Stigler s Law. In the third article, Lhoste references Keynes (91) and makes clear that his contributions were not occurring in total isolation. Beginning with his 1919 paper with Dorothy Wrinch (179), Harold Jeffreys adopted the degree of reasonable belief approach to probability, which was consistent with the approach in Keynes (91) but not with the objective ideas of Venn and others. They used this approach to assess the reasonableness of scientific theories, and in particular Jeffreys was focused on Eddington s representation of relativity theory. Jeffreys 1931 book on Scientific Inference (86) represents a continuation of the collaboration with Wrinch, and in it he derived Gosset s 1908 t-distribution result using inverse probability. Actually, he worked backward and showed that it corresponded to a prior proportional to 1/σ. And in his description of the result he clearly missed the inverse probability underpinnings of Gosset s work. In the early 1930s, Jeffreys engaged in a published exchange with R.A. Fisher, beginning in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and continuing in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. In this exchange they confronted one another on the meaning of probability, and on Fisher s fiducial argument and Jeffreys inverse probability approach. Nothing seemed to be resolved, and Jeffreys resumed his critique it is not widely recognized today as having substantial influence on the development of the subjective school.
11 Stephen E. Fienberg 11 of the Fisherian ideas in his 1939 book, Theory of Probability (87). That book provides Jeffreys effort at an axiom system for probability theory. He then laid out the inverse probability approach of updating degrees of beliefs in propositions by use of probability theory in particular Bayes theorem, to learn from experience and data. And he used an information-like invariance approach to derive objective priors that expressed ignorance or lack of knowledge in an effort to grasp the holy grail that had eluded statisticians since the days of Laplace. His examples remain among the most widely cited in the current objective Bayesian literature. The Theory of Probabilty is a remarkable book, and it has been read and reread by many modern Bayesians. Jeffreys also taught a course in statistics at Cambridge. Dennis Lindley recalls (154): Harold Jeffreys lectures were attended by about six of us who had come back from the war and fancied ourselves as statisticians. That was the first time he had had to give the complete course of lectures. He was such a bad lecturer that previously all had given him up, but we stuck at them, and very rewarding they were. In Italy during the 1930s, in a series of papers in Italian, Bruno de Finetti gave a different justification for personal or subjective probability, introducing the notion of exchangeability and the implicit role of prior distributions (see especially (42)). But almost two decades were to pass before Savage was to build on these ideas and develop a non-frequentist alternative to the Kolmogorov axioms, and others were to exploit the concept of exchangeability to develop hierarchical Bayesian methods. The best known of these papers, de Finetti (42), was subsequently reprinted several times in English translation, e.g., in Kyburg and Smokler (94). A two-volume synthesis of his Bayesian ideas appeared in Italian in 1970 and in English translation in 1974 and 1975 (45; 46). These volumes and their description of de Finetti s ideas on finitely additive probabilities and non-conglomerability gave later statisticians the tools to study the implications of the use of improper prior distributions. Exchangeability was presaged by W.E. Johnson, who described the idea as permutability but did not develop it in the way that de Finetti did. Meanwhile, in the United States, Bayes was not forgotten. W. Edwards Deming arranged for mimeo reprint of Bayes essay, which was circulated by U.S. Department of Agriculture Graduate School during the late 1930s and early 1940s. 4.3 Statistical Developments in WWII World War II marked a major turning point for statistics, both in Great Britain and in the United States. 19 Several different groups of statisticians were assembled to deal with the war effort, and mathematicians were recruited to carry out statistical tasks. Wallis (176) and Barnard and Plackett (12) give excellent overviews of these activities. 19 While there were statistical activities during World War II in other countries, none appear to have influenced the development of Bayesian methods in a fashion comparable to those that occurred in Great Britain and the United States. For a discussion of statistical activities in other countries see the overview in Fienberg (56).
12 12 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? Here I wish to focus on the simultaneous development of sequential analysis by Alan Turing, George Barnard, and Abraham Wald, as well as the personal links that were made that influenced some of the later course of Bayesian statistics. I begin with Alan Turing, best known for his codebreaking work and his later contributions to computer science. I.J. Good (72), who was Turing s statistical assistant at Bletchley Park during WWII, has described Turing s statistical contributions during this period, which were primarily Bayesian. Good recalls that [Turing] invented a Bayesian approach to sequential data analysis, using weights of evidence (though not under that name). A weight of evidence is the logarithm of a Bayes factor; for a Bayesian, this is the only possible definition, and the concept has been an obsession of mine ever since.... On one occasion I happened to meet George Barnard during the war, in London, and I confidentially [mentioned that we were using sequentially a Bayesian method in terms of what we now call weights of evidence (log-factors) for distinguishing between two hypotheses. Barnard said that, curiously enough, in his work for the Ministry of Supply, he was using something similar.] Thus Turing and Barnard invented sequential analysis independently of Wald.... Turing developed the sequential probability ratio test, except that he gave it a Bayesian interpretation in terms of the odds form of Bayes theorem. He wanted to be able to estimate the probability of a hypothesis, allowing for the prior probability, when information arrives piecemeal. When the odds form of Bayes theorem is used, it is unnecessary to mention the Neyman Pearson lemma. One morning I asked Turing Isn t this really Bayes theorem? and he said I suppose so. He hadn t mentioned Bayes previously. Now, Harold Jeffreys with Dorothy Wrinch had previously published the odds form of Bayes theorem (without the odds terminology and without the sequential aspect), and Turing might have seen their work, but probably he thought of it independently. 20 As this quote implies, Turing was doing Bayesian work in depth, and Good was learning many of these ideas from him and later put them to work in his own research. It makes clear that George Barnard also developed the ideas of sequential analysis and after the war he published his results as well. In his 1946 paper (9) on the topic, he too noted the importance of Bayes theorem in the general problem of sampling inspection. Following the war, Good wrote his book Probability and the Weighing of Evidence (71) which was an effort to describe the inferential ideas that Good has used with Turing, and it was essentially completed in 1947 although not published for another three years. At the time, Good was unaware of de Finetti s work. Among the scientific efforts to support the U.S. war effort, W. Allen Wallis set up and directed a Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University during the Second World War. The staff included many mathematicians, statisticians, and economists who subsequently became leaders in their field including Milton Friedman, Frederick 20 (8, pp ) as corrected by Good in personal correspondence.
13 Stephen E. Fienberg 13 Mosteller, L.J. Savage, Abraham Wald, and Jacob Wolfowitz (see Wallis (176)). SRG tackled a wide range of projects. For SRG, the idea of sequential sampling began with a question posed by a U.S. Navy captain about two firing procedures that were being tested to determine which procedure was superior. The captain indicated that, part way through the long test, he could often easily tell that one procedure was superior to the other. Wallis mulled this question over with Milton Friedman for a few days, and then they approached Abraham Wald with the problem. After a few months of work on the problem, Wald and his research group, which included Wolfowitz, developed and proved the theorem underlying the sequential probability ratio test, although unlike the versions of Turing and Barnard, his did not directly involve Bayes Theorem. This work was later published by Wald in 1947 in book form (174). SRG did many other statistical tasks including work on quality control. Mosteller s collaboration with Savage during this period was later to influence the development of Bayesian methods. And others were quick to follow up on the work of Wald. For example, David Blackwell credits a 1945 lecture by M.A. Girshick on sequential analysis that turned him into a statistician. Blackwell remembers Girshick recommending sampling until you ve seen enough. In the lecture, Girshick announced a theorem that Blackwell thought was false. Blackwell devised a counter example and sent it to Girshick. It was wrong, but sending it was right. Instead of dismissing it as the work of a crank, Blackwell said, he called and invited me to lunch (excerpted from an ASA web profile (6)). Nine years and several papers later, in 1954, the two published their Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions (19). The book, while strongly influenced by the work of Wald and others, was still essentially frenquentist, although others such as Morris DeGroot (48) later used ideas in it to develop the Bayesian notion of sufficiency for experiments. Others built on the Wald approach as well. During the post war period, the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago had two major research thrusts that were statistical in nature estimation in simultaneous equations models and rational decision making (see Christ (31)). Those who worked on the latter topic included Kenneth Arrow, Herman Chernoff, M.A. (Abe) Girshick, and Herman Rubin, and later Roy Radner. Much of their work followed the Wald tradition, with Bayesian ideas being an integral component, but for frequentist purposes. Rubin (137) wrote about subjective probability ideas in several unpublished papers, as well as jointly with Arrow and Girshick on decision methods (5; 70), and he gave his own version of the von Neumann and Morgenstern axioms. Chernoff (30), leaning in part on the work of Savage for his foundations book, derived decision functions for minimizing maximum risk. He noted the seeming contradiction between his results and the subjective approach: Theorem 3... suggests that one may regard postulates 1-8 as an axiomatization of the principle of insufficient reasoning.... Postulate 3 in particular is not compatible with a subjectivist approach. A similar decision-theory type of development was Robbins 1951 (133) paper on compound statistical decision problems, which introduced empirical Bayesian ideas, but from a strictly frequentist perspective. Turing had actually introduced empirical Bayes as a method as part of his wartime work, and Good developed these ideas further
14 14 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? in a 1953 paper (74), although it was not until the 1960s that these ideas entered the mainstream of Bayesian and frequentist thinking. Quite separate from the statistical developments linked to World War II was the work of the physicists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and elsewhere developing the atom bomb. But it was during this period that the ideas underlying the Monte Carlo method were developed, largely through the interactions of John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, and Nicholas Metropolis (114). While we now think of one of the subsequent developments, the Metropolis algorithm, as a cornerstone for Bayesian computations, a careful reading of the initial paper (113) describing the method shows little or no evidence of Bayesian methodology or thinking (see also, Metropolis (112)). Thus we see that, as statistics entered the 1950s, the dominant ideas had become frequentist, even though Bayes lurked in the background. As Dennis Lindley (106) has written: When I began studying statistics in 1943 the term Bayesian hardly existed; Bayes yes, we had his theorem, but not the adjective. And I.J. (Jack) Good (71), writing on the weighing of evidence using Bayes Theorem, in the third paragragh of the preface used the phrase subjective probability judgments, but nowhere in the book did he use the adjective Bayesian. He didn t even use the phrase Bayes factor, although the concept appears under the label factor, following Turing s suggestion to Good in a conversation in Good (73) also introduced precursors to hierarchical probability modeling as part of his post-wwii output. 5 The Neo-Bayesian Revival 5.1 First (?) Use of the Adjective Bayesian According to David (39; 40; 41), the term Bayesian was first used in print by R.A. Fisher in the 1950 introduction to his 1930 paper on fiducial inference entitled Inverse Probability, as reprinted in his Contributions to Mathematical Statistics (65): This short paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society was intended to introduce the notion of fiducial probability, and the type of inference which may be expressed in this measure. It opens with a discussion of the difficulties which had arisen from attempts to extend Bayes theorem to problems in which the essential information on which Bayes theorem is based is in reality absent, and passes on to relate the new measure to the likelihood function, previously introduced by the author, and to distinguish it from the Bayesian probability a posteriori. But in fact, as Edwards (51) notes, Fisher actually used the adjective earlier in Contributions to Mathematical Statistics (65), in his introduction to his 1921 paper On the probable error of a coefficient of correlation deduced from a small sample, which was actually not reprinted in the volume: In the final section this paper contains a discussion of the bearing of new ex-
15 Stephen E. Fienberg 15 act solutions of distributional problems on the nature of inductive inference. This is of interest for comparison with the paper on Inverse probability, published 1930, nine years later. In 1930 the notion of fiducial probability is first introduced using as an example the distribution found in this paper. In view of this later development the statement, We can know nothing of the probability of hypotheses or hypothetical quantities, is seen to be hasty and erroneous, in light of the different type of argument later developed. It will be understood, however, as referring only to the Bayesian probabilities a posteriori. Fisher had spent decades defending his fiducial approach first from Jeffreys and others as distinct from inverse probability, and then from the adherents of the Neyman-Pearson school. Indeed his own arguments took on a more Bayesian flavor (although not subjective) as he fought against the Neyman-Peason frequentists, especially in the last decade or so of his life. Edwards (51) gives a good over view of Fisher and Bayes Theorem and inverse probability. In personal correspondence, Jack Good notes that Bayesian is now usually used to refer to a whole philosophy or methodology in which subjective or logical probabilities are used, and Fisher had a far more restricted notion in mind! But Bayesian is the word Fisher chose to use, and such negative usage of the term suggests that it might have been used similarly by others in previous oral exchanges. Similarly, Savage (138), in his review essay of Abraham Wald s book on decision theory (Wald (175)), notes that the problem of dealing with uncertainty when probability does not apply to the unknown states of the world is unbayesian, statistical theory. A search of JSTOR reveals no earlier usage in any of the main American and British statistical journals. The more comprehensive (in terms of journal coverage) permuted title index of Ross and Tukey (136) contains no use of the term in the title of articles until the 1960s. Similarly, an electronic search of Current Index to Statistics revealed only one Bayesian paper prior to the 1960s, which was also in the results of the JSTOR search. 5.2 Bayesian Inference Becomes Bayesian Clearly Fisher s derisory remark about Bayesian methods could not be responsible for the adoption of the term Bayesian and the widespread adoption of Bayesian methods in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, at around the same time, there was a renewed interest in foundations and statistical decision theory, and this led to a melding of developments surrounding the role of subjective probability and new statistical tools for scientific inference and decisionmaking. In the United States, the clear leader of this movement was Leonard Jimmie Savage. Savage had been part of the Columbia Statistical Group in WWII and later moved to the University of Chicago in 1949, where he began an intense reconsideration of the Kolmogorov approach to the axioms of probability. It was during this period that Savage
16 16 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? discovered the work of Bruno de Finetti. In his 1951 review of Wald s book, Savage (138) points to the difficulty of the minimax approach, and he even cites de Finetti, but not in support of the subjective approach. Savage was grappling with ideas from von Neuman and Morgenstern (171) at the time, and he discovered and translated three early papers by Borel from the 1920s on game theory for publication in Econometrica (see (20; 22; 23)). He was also reading the work of Harold Jeffreys and Jack Good. Good (8) recalls, The first time I met [Savage], he came to see me when I was in London. It was in 1951 or 1952 while he was working on his book. He d been working in France and was visiting England briefly. He knew I d written the 1950 book, so, perhaps on his way back to the U.S., he visited my home. Jimmie and I began corresponding after that. He pointed out an error in my very first paper on causality, when I sent him a draft. Later I saw him in Chicago. He was remarkably well read for a person with such bad eyesight. It was Savage s 1954 book (140) to which Good refers that set the stage for the neo-bayesian revival. Thus it is surprising that not only is the term Bayesian absent from the book, but also that there is only one reference to Bayes, and that in connection with his theorem. In his first seven chapters, Savage laid out with mathematical rigor to rival that of Kolmogorov a series of axioms and theorems which could be derived from them, leading to the constructive methodology of maximizing expected utility, the ideas originally laid out in sketchier form by Ramsey (132) and von Neumann and Morgenstern (171) in their 1944 book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. His treatment relies heavily on ideas of personal probability from the work of Bruno de Finetti, in particular de Finetti (42; 43). 21 Savage s treatment of Jeffreys suggests that he did not regard his axiomatic approach as sufficiently mathematically rigorous to merit extended discussion and focus. 22 In the second part of his book, Savage attempted to justify the frequentist ideas of Fisher and others using his axiomatic approach, but he later recognized the futility of such an effort. Looking back to this effort in 1970, Savage (144) described his thinking in 1954: though interested in personal probability,..., not yet a personalistic Bayesian and... unaware of the likelihood principle. At the same time, de Finetti (44) used the label in his paper, La Notion de Horizon Bayesien. 23 In the mid-1950s, there was what now appears to have been an amazing confluence of statisticians at the University of Chicago, in part drawn by the power and persuasiveness 21 Savage and de Finetti were interacting and exchanging materials from the late 1940s onward, and there are clear cross-references in their work. For example, de Finetti (43) in his 1950 Berkeley symposium paper refers to an abstract of a paper presented by Savage in 1949 at the Econometric Society meeting and, in it, Savage refers to de Finetti s ideas, referencing de Finetti (42). 22 Jeffreys had not used utility as part of his axiomatic structure, although he was aware of Ramsey s work when he wrote his book. 23 In his review of this paper, I.J. Good (75) notes that it is primarily an exposition of ideas previously put forward in de Finetti (43). In that earlier paper, de Finetti does not use the adjective Bayesian but instead writes about Bayes conclusions, Bayes premises, Bayes theory, and the Bayes position. Thus the adjective had emerged in use as early as 1954 (the date when the paper was presented) and most certainly by 1956 when Good wrote his review.
17 Stephen E. Fienberg 17 of Savage. The faculty at the time included Harry Roberts and David Wallace; Morris (Morrie) DeGroot and Roy Radner were graduate students working with Savage as well. Among the visitors to the department during were Dennis Lindley and Frederick Mosteller. Mosteller had worked with Savage in SRG at Columbia during WWII, and his 1948 paper on pooling data (115) was in the empirical Bayesian spirit, although it used frequentist criteria. He also did pioneering work with Nogee (116) on experimental measurement of utility. In 1952, Savage visited Cambridge, where Lindley was a member of the faculty. John Pratt came the next year: I was at Chicago from September 1955 to June Jimmie s book had come out a year or two before, and I decided to read it. I sent him a note about misprints and such, on which he wrote replies. I have it, but it has no date. I got hung up on the de Finetti conjecture (p. 40) for a couple of weeks, but I read the rest of the book too. I had read and understood the result in Blackwell and Girshick, 24 but I think it stayed in another part of my brain, or maybe I didn t take it as meaning you should actually assess probabilities in principle. So perhaps it was Jimmie s book that made me realize how serious the whole matter is. (Pratt, personal communication) My point here is that considerable prior interaction set the stage for the arrival of these individuals at the University of Chicago, and that Savage was the intellectual draw. It was during this period that Savage himself moved much closer to a fully subjective Bayesian position, and soon thereafter and continuing over the next decade, the adjective Bayesian began to appear in papers and books by all of these individuals, e.g., see Savage (143) and the classic expository article by Edwards, Lindman, and Savage (52). But Savage wrote about Bayesian ideas in a 1958 letter 25 to Dennis Lindley in connection with comments on a draft of Lindley (104). A second and seemingly independent activity began a few years later at the Harvard Business School when Howard Raiffa joined forces with Robert Schlaifer to work on a Bayesian response to the frequentist theory of exponential family distributions, and they developed the notion of conjugate priors for this family. Raiffa was trained in the traditional mathematical statistics mold and his 1957 book with Luce (110), Games and Decisions, relied on the more traditional formulation of game theory. 26 Schlaifer was trained as a classical historian, and, according to Raiffa (see the interview with Fienberg (59)), when he was asked to teach statistics, he read Fisher, Neyman and Pearson not Wald and not Savage and he concluded that standard statistical pedagogy did not address the main problem of a businessman: how to make decisions under uncertainty. Not knowing anything about the subjective/objective philosophical divide, 24 Blackwell and Girshick s 1954 book, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions, a centrepiece of my graduate education, contains a complete and rigorous argument but presents it almost incidentally, in the midst of objectivistic exotica, and the clincher appears only in an exercise with no interpretation. Pratt (129) referring to Theorem in Section 4.3 and Problem from Blackwell and Girshick (19). 25 Wallis (177, p. 21) quotes from this letter. 26 Bayes appeared, but not yet in full Bayesian form. For example, on p. 312 they defined Bayes formula and on p. 313 they formulated the Bayes decision rule against the a priori distribution.
18 18 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? he threw away the books and invented Bayesian decision theory from scratch. In their collaboration, Raiffa and Schlaifer gave Bayesian definitions to frequentist notions such as sufficiency, which they said should come from the posterior distribution, 27 and they adapted Fisher s and Jeffreys definitions of likelihood, noting the primary relevance of that part they called the likelihood kernel. How did they come to use the adjective Bayesian to describe their approach? Raiffa (59) has suggested that it was natural for Schlaifer to adopt the label Bayesian in a positive sense to describe his approach to probability reasoning and statistical methods. Schlaifer s (147) 1959 introductory probability and statistics text not only uses the term but also advocates the use of Bayesian principles for business decisions. 28 By the time their classic book, Applied Statistical Decision Theory, appeared in 1961 (131), the label Bayesian showed up throughout, beginning with the preface. Shortly thereafter, John Pratt moved from Harvard s Department of Statistics to the Harvard Business School and joined in this effort with a number of Raiffa and Schlaifer s students and former students who had been trained as thorough Bayesians. As I noted, shortly after these activities at Chicago and Harvard in the mid-1950s, Bayesian became the adjective of choice for both the proponents and the opponents of Bayesian methodology. As noted above, I.J. Good first used the term in a 1956 review of a paper by de Finetti (44) in Mathematical Reviews. But he began to use the label quite regularly after that, e.g., see Good (76), where he also introduced the phrase Bayes factor, and of course his important 1965 book (77). Lindley s first Bayesian papers appeared in 1957 and 1958 (101; 102; 104), but like Savage his full acceptance of the Bayesian philosophy took many years to accomplish. Even in his two-volume 1965 text (105), Lindley focused on finding Bayesian solutions that resembled frequentist ones. Savage likewise influenced many others. David Blackwell s pioneering work with Girshick brought him close to Bayesian ideas, but Jimmie convinced me that the Bayes approach is absolutely the right way to do statistical inference, he has observed (6). So how did Bayesian inference become Bayesian? Lindley (106) suggests, Wald... had proved that the only decisions worth considering, technically the admissible solutions, were obtained by placing a probability distribution on the parameters about which a decision was to be made, and then using Bayes theorem. Moreover he called them Bayes solutions, using Bayes as an adjective, and although he did not use the term, it is but a short step to the proper adjectival form, Bayesian. While the adjective first appears to have been used pejoratively, a small handful of statisticians embraced the notion of Bayesian to describe methods that revived inverse probability and imbued them with new methods and new mathematical foundations. 27 An earlier such definition of Bayesian sufficiency is due to Kolmogorov (92). 28 Savage (140), in the preface to the 1971 paperback edition of his book, refers to Schaifer s book and notes : This is a welcome opportunity to say that his ideas were developed wholly independently of the present book, and indeed of other personalistic literature. They are in full harmony with the ideas in this book but are more down to earth and less spellbound by tradition.
19 Stephen E. Fienberg 19 Savage, Raiffa, and Schlaifer did not invent the eponym but, far more than Wald, their enthusiasm for and development of a new foundation for Bayesian methods encouraged others to adopt them and to use the Bayesian name. In his 1958 paper, Good wrote the following: By a neo-bayesian or neo/bayes-laplace philosophy we mean one that makes use of inverse probabilities, with or without utilities, but without necessarily using Bayes postulate of equiprobable or uniform initial distributions, and with explicit emphasis on the use of probability judgments in the form of inequalities. (76, p. 803) Thus it seems apt to describe the 1950s as the era of the neo-bayesian revival. But in many ways it took until 1962, and the publication of Allan Birnbaum s paper (18) on the likelihood principle as well as the Savage volume on Foundations of Statistical Inference (143), for the neo-bayesian revival to become complete. The Savage volume was developed from a presentation Jimmie Savage gave in London in 1959 and included prepared discussions by Maurice Bartlett, George Barnard, David Cox, Egon Pearson, and C.A.B. Smith, and a more informal exchange that also included I.J. Good, Dennis Lindley, and others. Savage s introductory essay introduced many of the themes of modern Bayesian analysis including the role of the likelihood principle and the principle of precise measurement explored further in Edwards, Lindman and Savage (52). The Birnbaum paper was based on a special American Statistical Association discussion meeting held in late 1961, and its discussants included Savage, Barnard, Box, Good, Lindley, Pratt, and Dempster. In particular, Savage noted I think that I, myself, came to... Bayesian statistics... seriously only through recognition of the likelihood principle; and it took me a year or two to make the transition.... I can t know what everyone else will do, but I suspect that once the likelihood principle is widely recognized, people will not long stop at that halfway house but will go forward and accept the implications of personalistic probability for statistics. (18, p. 307) Of course not all of the Birnbaum discussants were in agreement, either with him or with Savage. Irwin Bross, for example expressed his view that the basic themes of this paper were well-known to Fisher, Neyman, Egon Pearson and others well back in the 1920 s. But these men realized, as the author doesn t, that the concepts cannot be used for scientific reporting. So, they went on to develop confidence intervals in the 1930s... The author here proposes to push the clock back 45 years, but at least this puts him ahead of the Bayesians, who would like to turn the clock back 150 years. (18, p. 310) Lindley (107) recalls,
20 20 When Did Bayesian Inference Become Bayesian? Savage [told] a good story about the [likelihood] principle. When he was first told it by George Barnard, he expressed surprise that anyone as brilliant as George could say something so ridiculous. Later he came to wonder how anyone could deny something so obviously correct. The neo-bayesian revival fused this renewed emphasis on the likelihood principle with Bayes Theorem and subjective probability as the mechanisms for achieving inferential coherence (c.f. Lindley (108)). 5.3 Departmental Homes for Statistics and the Neo-Bayesian Revival Until the twentieth century, there were few university departments organized around separate disciplines, be they substantive or methodological, and when they began to emerge, there were few in statistics. The principal early exceptions were the enterprise led by Karl Pearson at University College London, founded shortly after the turn of the century, and the Statistics Laboratory at Iowa State College (now University), founded in the early 1930s. Nonetheless there were numerous chairs held by important figures in probability and statistics throughout this period, such as A.A. Chuprov in St. Petersburg, although these did not lead to the institutionalization of statistics outside of mathematics or economics. Later in the U.S., Columbia University, George Washington University, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University began separate departments. One can trace the growth of the identity of statistics as a separate identifiable discipline to the 1920s and 1930s and even 1940s, with the growing influence of Fisher and others. Nonetheless, even the creation of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in the 1930s occurred at a time when most American statisticians resided in mathematics departments. Thus it should not be thought of as remarkable that most of those who contributed to the early developments of the evolution of Bayesian thinking were not necessarily identifiable as statisticians but rather as economists, mathematicians, scientists in the broadest of senses (e.g., Laplace and Gauss), philosophers, and physicists. The institutionalization of statistics in the form of the creation of separate departments of statistics in the U.S. occurred after World War II, largely in the 1950s and 1960s, just at the time of the neo-bayesian revival. For example, the department at Stanford was created in 1948, and a number of the new faculty had direct or indirect ties to the activities chronicled above. The department at the University of Chicago was created in 1949 (initially as a Committee), and was chaired by Jimmie Savage during the key years of the neo-bayesian revival. Fred Mosteller, who was a visitor at Chicago in , returned to Harvard and was the first chair of the department there when it was created in George Box helped establish the department at the University of Wisconsin in 1960 and was soon joined by others of the Bayesian persuasion such as Irwin Guttman and George Tiao. Frank Anscombe, who worked on an alternative axiomatic treatment of subjective utility with Aumann (4), came to Yale in 1963 to help found its department and was joined by Jimmie Savage in Morrie DeGroot helped found the department at Carnegie Mellon in the mid 1960s. Not surprisingly,
Arnold Zellner. Booth School of Business. University of Chicago. 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637. arnold.zellner@chicagobooth.
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text:
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the severity of the U.S. drought may be peaking, but the impact on corn and soybean crops may not be known until harvest, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
Steadying weather conditions may ease pressure to relax federal requirements for the use of corn to make ethanol, he added in an interview at the Iowa State Fair.
"The overall impact of the drought is beginning to decline," Vilsack said. Uneven dryness from farm to farm make crop predictions difficult this year.
The condition of the nation's soybean crop improved last week for the first time this year, and corn's good-to-excellent ratings leveled off at 23%, as rain and cooler temperatures reduced plant stress, the USDA reported.
Moreover, drought conditions are expected to persist in the Corn Belt and the Great Plains through November, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report yesterday. Lower temperatures and rain expected in parts of the Corn Belt won't be sufficient to break the drought that has caused grain prices to soar for months, said Joel Widenor, co-founder of Commodity Weather Group, LLC in Bethesda, MD.
Vilsack said as USDA assesses the size and condition of this year's harvest, it is also starting work on the drought's impact on the farm economy. His department is starting to look at the potential consequences for next year's crops in terms of credit availability and planning.
Jose Graziano da Silva, director-general of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, has called for a suspension of the U.S. ethanol mandate to free up more corn for food and livestock feed. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney indicated that the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency are contemplating what action to take regarding requests for waivers from state governors and more than 175 members of Congress.
For his part, Vilsack said he fears that waiving the ethanol mandate may bring long-term harm to investment in biofuel production without producing much relief for food prices.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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