Statistical Evidence in Experiments and in Record Values

Abstract

According to the law of likelihood, statistical evidence for one (simple) hypothesis against another is measured by their likelihood ratio. When the experimenter can choose between two or more experiments (of approximately the same cost) to obtain data, he would want to know which experiment provides (on average) stronger true evidence for one hypothesis against another. In this article, after defining a pre-experimental criterion for the potential strength of evidence provided by an experiment, based on entropy distance, we compare the potential statistical evidence in lower record values with that in the same number of iid observations from the same parent distribution. We also establish a relation between Fisher information and Kullback–Leibler distance.