Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty Member

Michael John Evans BSc,, MSc,, Ph.D.

Research Interests

• the foundations of statistical inference
• inferences derived by the concept of relative belief
• checking for prior-data conflict
• model checking
• applications

Education & Training History

B.Sc. 1974 Mathematics, U. of Western Ontario

M.Sc. 1975 Statistics, U. of Toronto

Ph.D. 1977 Statistics, U. of Toronto

Primary Teaching Responsibilities

• STA3000 Advanced Statistics
• STAC70 Statistics and Finance

Professional Summary & Appointments

Assistant Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto, 1977

Associate Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto, 1982

Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto,, 1990

Chair, Department of Statistics, University of Toronto, 1992-97

Associate Chair, Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, UTSC, 2005-10, 2012-13

President-Elect, Statistical Society of Canada (elected), 2012-13

Associate Editor, Bayesian Analysis, 2005-2015

Associate Editor Canadian Journal of Statistics 1998-2006

Associate Editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association – Theory and Methods 1989-2005

Executive Secretary – International Society for Bayesian Analysis (elected) 1999-2002

Institute of Mathematical Statistics representative on Management Board for Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 1997-2003

Program Chair for the meeting of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Toronto, August 2004

Honours & Awards

• Fellow of the American Statistical Association

Current Research Projects

• Inequalities for relative belief ratios and Bayes factors (with Zeynep Baskurt)
• The method of concentration for assessing hypotheses in continuous models when the Borel paradox applies (with Zeynep Baskurt)
• Inferences from prior-based loss functions (with Gun Ho Jang)
• What did Birnbaum prove?

Representative Publications

• Evans, M. Gilula, Z. and Guttman, I. (2011) An inferential approach to collapsing scales. Quantitative Marketing and Economics, 10:283-304, 2012.
• Evans, M. and Jang, G-H. (2011) A limit result for the prior predictive applied to checking for prior-data conflict. Statistics and Probability Letters, 81, 1034-1038.
• Evans, M. and Jang, G-H. (2011). Weak informativity and the information in one prior relative to another. Statistical Science, Vol. 26, No. 3, 423-439.
• Evans, M. and Jang, G-H. (2010). Invariant P-values for model checking. Annals of Statistics, 2010, Vol. 38, No. 1, 312-323.
• Seok, S-C., Evans,M. and Vieland, V.J. (2009) Fast and accurate calculation of a computationally intensive statistic for mapping disease genes. Journal of Computational Biology. May 2009, 16(5): 659-676.
• Evans, M. and Shakhatreh, M. (2008). Optimal properties of some Bayesian inferences. Electronic Journal of Statistics, Vol. 2, 1268-1280.
• Evans (2007) Comment: Bayesian Checking of the Second Levels of Hierarchical Models. Statistical Science, 22, 3, 344-348.
• Evans, M. (2007) Invited discussion of “Nested sampling for Bayesian computations by John Skilling”. Bayesian Statistics 8, Proceedings of the Eighth Valencia International Meeting, Jun2 2-6, 2006, eds Bernardo, J.M., Bayarri, M.J., Berger, J.O., Dawid, A.P., Heckerman, D., Smith, A.F.M. and West, M., 507-512.
• Evans, M. and Moshonov, H., (2007) Checking for prior-data conflict with hierarchically specified priors. Bayesian Statistics and its Applications, eds. A.K. Upadhyay, U. Singh, D. Dey, Anamaya Publishers, New Delhi, 145-159.
• Evans, M. and Moshonov, H. (2006) Checking for prior-data conflict. Bayesian Analysis, Volume 1, Number 4, 893-914.
• Evans, M., Guttman, I. and Swartz, T. (2006) Optimality and computations for relative surprise inferences. Canadian Journal of Statistics., Vol. 34, No. 1, 113-129.
• Evans, M. (2003) Invited Comment on “A theory of statistical models for Monte Carlo integration” by Kong, Mcullagh, Meng, Nicolae and Tan. JRSSB, Vol. 65, Part 3, 604-606.
• Evans, M. and Zou, T. (2002) Robustness of Relative Surprise Inferences to Choice of Prior. Recent Advances in Statistical Methods, Proceedings of Statistics 2001 Canada: The 4th Conference in Applied Statistics Montreal, Canada 6 – 8 July 2001, Yogendra P. Chaubey (ed.), 90-115, Imperial College Press.