Statistical Inference

Principles of Inference: sufficiency, conditionality, and likelihood; examples and counter examples; conditional inference and ancillarity. Theory of Hypothesis Testing: Neyman-Pearson lemma; similar tests; invariant tests. Asymptotic Theory: maximum likelihood and related theory; large-sample properties of parametric significance tests. Interval Estimation: confidence intervals and significance intervals; location and scale models, conditional intervals. Introduction to Decision Theory: loss and risk functions, admissibility; minimax and Bayes rules; prior and posterior analysis. The course content of Stat 850 is a presumed prerequisite for Stat 908.