A biologist's guide to mathematical modeling in ecology and evolution

Abstract

Scientists perform experiments and gather data to gain evidence for or against various hypotheses about how the world works. This sounds straightforward, but exactly how we use this data to make quantitative statements about various hypotheses requires a bit more care. In fact, there are two related, but philosophically distinct, approaches to scientific inference. To some extent these two approaches parallel the frequency interpretation and the subjective interpretation of probability. “Classical” statistical analysis is most closely allied with the frequency interpretation, whereas “Bayesian” analysis is allied with the subjective interpretation.