The essence of the frequentist technique is to apply probability to data. If you suspect your friend has a weighted coin, for example, and you observe that it came up heads nine times out of 10, a frequentist would calculate the probability of getting such a result with an unweighted coin. The answer (about 1 percent) is not a direct measure of the probability that the coin is weighted; it’s a measure of how improbable the nine-in-10 result is — a piece of information that can be useful in investigating your suspicion.

Image Thomas Bayes

By contrast, Bayesian calculations go straight for the probability of the hypothesis, factoring in not just the data from the coin-toss experiment but any other relevant information — including whether you have previously seen your friend use a weighted coin.

Scientists who have learned Bayesian statistics often marvel that it propels them through a different kind of scientific reasoning than they had experienced using classical methods.

“Statistics sounds like this dry, technical subject, but it draws on deep philosophical debates about the nature of reality,” said the Princeton University astrophysicist Edwin Turner, who has witnessed a widespread conversion to Bayesian thinking in his field over the last 15 years.

Countering Pure Objectivity

Frequentist statistics became the standard of the 20th century by promising just-the-facts objectivity, unsullied by beliefs or biases. In the 2003 statistics primer “Dicing With Death,” Stephen Senn traces the technique’s roots to 18th-century England, when a physician named John Arbuthnot set out to calculate the ratio of male to female births.

Arbuthnot gathered christening records from 1629 to 1710 and found that in London, a few more boys were recorded every year. He then calculated the odds that such an 82-year run could occur simply by chance, and found that it was one in trillions. This frequentist calculation can’t tell them what is causing the sex ratio to be skewed. Arbuthnot proposed that God skewed the birthrates to balance the higher mortality that had been observed among boys, but scientists today favor a biological explanation over a theological one.

Later in the 1700s, the mathematician and astronomer Daniel Bernoulli used a similar technique to investigate the curious geometry of the solar system, in which planets orbit the sun in a flat, pancake-shaped plane. If the orbital angles were purely random — with Earth, say, at zero degrees, Venus at 45 and Mars at 90 — the solar system would look more like a sphere than a pancake. But Bernoulli calculated that all the planets known at the time orbited within seven degrees of the plane, known as the ecliptic.