Bahadur Memorial Lectures: Nancy Reid (Day 1)
11:30 am–12:30 pm Jones 303
Title: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”
Abstract: This is the title I used the first time I taught the U of T First-Year Seminar course, many years ago. I was nervous about the prospect of giving a seminar-style course for students fresh from high school, and unsure how to distinguish it from a run-of-the-mill introductory statistics course. As it turned out, however, the experience had a big impact on my teaching, research, and views on statistical science. Although much has changed in our field in the years since, the basic principles of reasoning with uncertainty have not. In this talk I will reflect on my experiences in trying to convey the ongoing importance of statistical science and perhaps hazard a guess about the future.
Bahadur Memorial Lectures: Nancy Reid (Day 2)
3:00–4:00 pm DSI 105
Title: “All Models are Wrong”
Abstract: This talk will consider the assessment of semiparametric and other highly-parametrized models from the perspective of foundational principles of parametric statistical inference. It is cast as a generalised version of the Fisherian sufficiency/co-sufficiency separation, replacing out-of-sample prediction error by a type of within-sample prediction error. The theory is illustrated through several examples, including a post-reduction inference approach to confidence sets of sparse regression models. This is joint work with Heather Battey.