Lectures on Statistics in Theory: Prelude to Statistics in Practice

Abstract

This is a writeup of lectures on "statistics" that have evolved from the initial version for the 2009 Hadron Collider Physics Summer School at CERN to versions for other venues and, most recently, for the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications in 2024. The emphasis is on foundations, using simple examples to illustrate the points that are still debated in the professional statistics literature. The three main approaches to interval estimation (Neyman confidence, Bayesian, likelihood ratio) are discussed and compared in detail, with and without nuisance parameters. Hypothesis testing is discussed mainly from the frequentist point of view, with pointers to the Bayesian literature. Various foundational issues are emphasized, including the conditionality principle and the likelihood principle.