Professor Art Owen presents the inaugural David Sprott Distinguished Lecture. A reception will be held in the Bruce White Atrium after the lecture.
Empirical likelihood
Speaker: Professor Art Owen, Department of Statistics, Stanford University
Abstract: Likelihood methods provide one of the most versatile and effective ways to handle data. They give us tests and confidence intervals with very strong optimality measures. But the cost for using them is usually that we have to know a family of distributions generating our data. Very often we have no reason to assume that any of our usual parametric families truly contain the distribution of our data. Without such a distribution, parametric models can be misleading, i.e., wrong.
Empirical likelihood is a method that provides the benefits of a likelihood function without requiring the user to know a parametric family for the data. The data themselves supply their own parametric family at a quick enough rate to make the resulting tests and confidence intervals reliable. This talk will show some examples of how empirical likelihood can be used.