Dicing with Death

"I know Stephen, and he is full of very entertaining jokes and rude remarks about people. This book is somewhat similar to The Drunkard’s Walk in that it covers the history of probability. But since Stephen’s background is in medical statistics, he looks at clinical trials and other medical studies. He is particularly interested in different ideas on statistical inference. It is not generally known that within the statistical world, for decades if not centuries, there have been arguments about different ways of thinking about inferences. This is the way that you draw conclusions from data about the underlying states of the world. Some of these arguments involve quite deep philosophical issues. For example, “What is probability?” Stephen Senn covers the different schools of statistical inference, including the so-called Bayesian inference, of which I am an enthusiast, as well as that based on [Ronald] Fisher, [Jerzy] Neyman and [Karl] Pearson. Stephen Senn tends to follow the Fisherian approach, and he can be very rude about the Bayesian school. He accuses them of having meetings where they sing Bayesian songs which he says are of “mind-numbing puerility”. As someone who has sung some of these songs at meetings, I think he might have a point. Yes, he deals with the need for randomisation when evaluating a medical treatment – how you should assign patients at random to treatment or a control group, in order to make sure that the real differences in the outcome are due to what you have done, rather than just how you selected your patients. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He also puts in some maths , and even tries to explain quite technical issues such as the Cox Proportional Hazard Regression Model for survival analysis. To put this into a popular book is very bold and I admire his courage. For those who don’t know, this is an incredibly valuable way to compare, for example, how long people live after different medical treatments. It was developed in cancer therapy, when people were trying new cancer drugs and then watching the patients to see what happened. That is known as survival analysis, which had previously been applied to things like the length of time that a light bulb survived before it expired. Then this theory was moved over to medical statistics, and the statistician David Cox developed a mechanism for comparing groups of patients at the same time as seeing how other factors might effect their survival. The major international cancer prize was given to him for his work on this, and it has been cited by about 25,000 people."