Response to Letters by Michael Lavine and Christopher Tong

摘要

Let me start by stating that I am highly appreciative of the letters to the editor by Michael Lavine and Christopher Tong. Our field badly needs discussions on these important points. I view these letters as a constructive start of such a discussion. Both authors disagree with my criticism of the statement by George Box that all models are wrong, but some are useful-a statement made in a historical context in which parametric models were the norm. Given that different notions of the word model are used, both within our discipline as well as across disciplines, it is important to first clarify that I refer to so-called statistical models defined as the set of possible probability distributions of the data.