A Bayesian Approach to Absent Evidence Reasoning

Abstract

Under what conditions is the failure to have evidence that p evidence that p is false? Absent evidence reasoning is common in many sciences, including astronomy, archeology, biology and medicine. An often-repeated epistemological motto is that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Analysis of absent evidence reasoning usually takes place in a deductive or frequentist hypothesis-testing framework. Instead, I develop a Bayesian analysis of this motto and prove that, under plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

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