Necessary/recommended level of theory for developing statistical intuition

I think this video by Michael I Jordan is extremely helpful for understanding how Bayes and Frequentist methods complement each other, with the key tool being decision theory. (slides for video)

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Decision theory is an extremely useful perspective in thinking about fundamentals of statistical inference. (10:20-10:44)

This video with Jim Berger, Sander Greenland, and Robert Matthews provided me with the information needed to correct a lot of misconceptions I had about the relation between Frequentist and Bayesian methods. Matthew’s resurrection of Reverse Bayesian methods creates a great opportunity to combine the insights of Bayesians with those of the Frequentists.

Finally, more recent work on so-called “fiducial inference” via the notion of “Confidence” distributions (a generalization of confidence intervals) can show relationships between Bayesian posteriors, bootstrap distributions, and “Fiducial” distributions. A whole collection of papers on this unifying perspective (known as BFF: Bayes, Frequentist, Fiducial → Best Friends Forever) can be found here (most require “mathematical maturity”):

https://stat.rutgers.edu/home/mxie/SelectedPapers.htm

A good intro to confidence distributions can be found in this paper by @COOLSerdash as well as searching past threads.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sim.8293

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