Lovegrove Mathematicals

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"Dedicated to making Likelinesses the entity of prime interest"

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This website is maintained by

Roger Lovegrove CMath FIMA
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@LovegroveMaths

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What this site is about

This site is about those aspects of mathematics which I spend my time working on. There are currently two main headings, Likelinesses and Distributions:-

Likelinesses

"Likeliness" is a term I introduced into my thinking because I did not like the generally-used term "best-estimate of (frequentist) probability": it's too wordy and is based on too many assumptions.

It is easy to confuse frequentist probabilities and likelinesses, especially as the latter can be used as a predictor of the former; it can at times be very difficult to tell whether one is dealing with specifically a frequentist probability or a likeliness. That confusion can give rise to some very serious errors, not only in practical calculations but also in the theory, so it is worthwhile sorting out the differences betwen the two.

The main points are:-

This site summarises the main results. A more detailed discussion, including some proofs not given here, can be found in the pdf: Fundamentals of Likelinesses

Distributions

A side-issue to work on Likelinesses is their actual calculation. This is best-done by numerical means, and so requires the development of algorithms to generate different types of distribution, such as

The approach used on this site is to use those algorithms not only as a means of calculating values of distributions but also as the formal definition of the distributions.

It is distributions that I am currently mostly interested in, for their own sake rather than because of their use when calculating likelinesses.