Independent Media Agencies: David Spiegelhalter brings Bayes and Fisher to BBC iPlayer

Thursday, 11 January 2018

David Spiegelhalter brings Bayes and Fisher to BBC iPlayer

RSS president David Spiegelhalter is interviewed by Brian Cox in a short BBC programme on two towering figures of statistics, Thomas Bayes and Ronald Fisher. The programme is part of a six-part BBC series, People of Science, which is available on the BBC iPlayer from today (11 January 2017).

In his programme, David talks about why he chose Bayes and Fisher as his ‘people of science’ and shows how Bayesian ideas are everywhere in the modern world, from email spam filters to machine learning algorithms. He also talks about the importance of Fisher’s P-values in scientific research - then demonstrates, using a billiards table, the difference between the two statisticians’ approaches to inference.