What is Randomness?

from Lars Syll

Modern probabilistic econometrics relies on the notion of probability. To at all be amenable to econometric analysis, economic observations allegedly have to be conceived as random events.

But is it really necessary to model the economic system as a system where randomness can only be analyzed and understood when based on an a priori notion of probability?

In probabilistic econometrics, events and observations are as a rule interpreted as random variables as if generated by an underlying probability density function, and a fortiori – since probability density functions are only definable in a probability context – consistent with a probability. As Haavelmo (1944:iii) has it:

For no tool developed in the theory of statistics has any meaning – except , perhaps for descriptive purposes – without being referred to some stochastic scheme.

When attempting to convince us of the necessity of founding empirical economic analysis on probability models, Haavelmo – building largely on the earlier Fisherian paradigm – actually forces econometrics to (implicitly) interpret events as random variables generated by an underlying probability density function.

This is at odds with reality. Randomness obviously is a fact of the real world. Probability, on the other hand, attaches to the world via intellectually constructed models, and a fortiori is only a fact of a probability generating machine or a well constructed experimental arrangement or “chance set-up”.

Just as there is no such thing as a “free lunch,” there is no such thing as a “free probability.” To be able at all to talk about probabilities, you have to specify a model. If there is no chance set-up or model that generates the probabilistic outcomes or events – in statistics one refers to any process where you observe or measure as an experiment (rolling a die) and the results obtained as the outcomes or events (number of points rolled with the die, being e. g. 3 or 5) of the experiment –there strictly seen is no event at all.

Probability is a relational element. It always must come with a specification of the model from which it is calculated. And then to be of any empirical scientific value it has to be shown to coincide with (or at least converge to) real data generating processes or structures – something seldom or never done!

And this is the basic problem with economic data. If you have a fair roulette-wheel, you can arguably specify probabilities and probability density distributions. But how do you conceive of the analogous nomological machines for prices, gross domestic product, income distribution etc? Only by a leap of faith. And that does not suffice. You have to come up with some really good arguments if you want to persuade people into believing in the existence of socio-economic structures that generate data with characteristics conceivable as stochastic events portrayed by probabilistic density distributions!

From a realistic point of view we really have to admit that the socio-economic states of nature that we talk of in most social sciences – and certainly in econometrics – are not amenable to analyze as probabilities, simply because in the real world open systems that social sciences – including econometrics – analyze, there are no probabilities to be had!

The processes that generate socio-economic data in the real world cannot just be assumed to always be adequately captured by a probability measure. And, so, it cannot really be maintained – as in the Haavelmo paradigm of probabilistic econometrics – that it even should be mandatory to treat observations and data – whether cross-section, time series or panel data – as events generated by some probability model. The important activities of most economic agents do not usually include throwing dice or spinning roulette-wheels. Data generating processes – at least outside of nomological machines like dice and roulette-wheels – are not self-evidently best modeled with probability measures.

If we agree on this, we also have to admit that probabilistic econometrics lacks a sound justification. I would even go further and argue that there really is no justifiable rationale at all for this belief that all economically relevant data can be adequately captured by a probability measure. In most real world contexts one has to argue one’s case. And that is obviously something seldom or never done by practitioners of probabilistic econometrics.

Econometrics and probability are intermingled with randomness. But what is randomness?

In probabilistic econometrics it is often defined with the help of independent trials – two events are said to be independent if the occurrence or nonoccurrence of either one has no effect on the probability of the occurrence of the other – as drawing cards from a deck, picking balls from an urn, spinning a roulette wheel or tossing coins – trials which are only definable if somehow set in a probabilistic context.

But if we pick a sequence of prices – say 2, 4, 3, 8, 5, 6, 6 – that we want to use in an econometric regression analysis, how do we know the sequence of prices is random and a fortiori being able to treat as generated by an underlying probability density function? How can we argue that the sequence is a sequence of probabilistically independent random prices? And are they really random in the sense that is most often applied in probabilistic econometrics – where X is called a random variable only if there is a sample space S with a probability measure and X is a real-valued function over the elements of S?

Bypassing the scientific challenge of going from describable randomness to calculable probability by just assuming it, is of course not an acceptable procedure. Since a probability density function is a “Gedanken” object that does not exist in a natural sense, it has to come with an export license to our real target system if it is to be considered usable.

Among those who at least honestly try to face the problem – the usual procedure is to refer to some artificial mechanism operating in some “games of chance” of the kind mentioned above and which generates the sequence. But then we still have to show that the real sequence somehow coincides with the ideal sequence that defines independence and randomness within our – to speak with science philosopher Nancy Cartwright (1999) – “nomological machine”, our chance set-up, our probabilistic model.

As the originator of the Kalman filter, Rudolf Kalman (1994:143), notes:

Not being able to test a sequence for ‘independent randomness’ (without being told how it was generated) is the same thing as accepting that reasoning about an “independent random sequence” is not operationally useful.

So why should we define randomness with probability? If we do, we have to accept that to speak of randomness we also have to presuppose the existence of nomological probability machines, since probabilities cannot be spoken of – and actually, to be strict, do not at all exist – without specifying such system-contexts (how many sides do the dice have, are the cards unmarked, etc)

If we do adhere to the Fisher-Haavelmo paradigm of probabilistic econometrics we also have to assume that all noise in our data is probabilistic and that errors are well-behaving, something that is hard to justifiably argue for as a real phenomena, and not just an operationally and pragmatically tractable assumption.

Maybe Kalman’s (1994:147) verdict that

Haavelmo’s error that randomness = (conventional) probability is just another example of scientific prejudice

is, from this perspective seen, not far-fetched.

Accepting Haavelmo’s domain of probability theory and sample space of infinite populations– just as Fisher’s (1922:311) “hypothetical infinite population, of which the actual data are regarded as constituting a random sample”, von Mises’ “collective” or Gibbs’ ”ensemble” – also implies that judgments are made on the basis of observations that are actually never made!

Infinitely repeated trials or samplings never take place in the real world. So that cannot be a sound inductive basis for a science with aspirations of explaining real-world socio-economic processes, structures or events. It’s not tenable.

As David Salsburg (2001:146) notes on probability theory:

[W]e assume there is an abstract space of elementary things called ‘events’ … If a measure on the abstract space of events fulfills certain axioms, then it is a probability. To use probability in real life, we have to identify this space of events and do so with sufficient specificity to allow us to actually calculate probability measurements on that space … Unless we can identify [this] abstract space, the probability statements that emerge from statistical analyses will have many different and sometimes contrary meanings.

Just as e. g. Keynes (1921) and Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Salsburg (2001:301f) is very critical of the way social scientists – including economists and econometricians – uncritically and without arguments have come to simply assume that one can apply probability distributions from statistical theory on their own area of research:

Probability is a measure of sets in an abstract space of events. All the mathematical properties of probability can be derived from this definition. When we wish to apply probability to real life, we need to identify that abstract space of events for the particular problem at hand … It is not well established when statistical methods are used for observational studies … If we cannot identify the space of events that generate the probabilities being calculated, then one model is no more valid than another … As statistical models are used more and more for observational studies to assist in social decisions by government and advocacy groups, this fundamental failure to be able to derive probabilities without ambiguity will cast doubt on the usefulness of these methods.

Some wise words that ought to be taken seriously by probabilistic econometricians is also given by mathematical statistician Gunnar Blom (2004:389):

If the demands for randomness are not at all fulfilled, you only bring damage to your analysis using statistical methods. The analysis gets an air of science around it, that it does not at all deserve.

Richard von Mises (1957:103) noted that

Probabilities exist only in collectives … This idea, which is a deliberate restriction of the calculus of probabilities to the investigation of relations between distributions, has not been clearly carried through in any of the former theories of probability.

And obviously not in Haavelmo’s paradigm of probabilistic econometrics either. It would have been better if one had heeded von Mises warning (1957:172) that

the field of application of the theory of errors should not be extended too far.

This importantly also means that if you cannot show that data satisfies all the conditions of the probabilistic nomological machine – including randomness – then the statistical inferences used, lack sound foundations!

References

Gunnar Blom et al: Sannolikhetsteori och statistikteori med tillämpningar, Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Cartwright, Nancy (1999), The Dappled World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher, Ronald (1922), On the mathematical foundations of theoretical statistics. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A, 222.

Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1971), The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press.

Haavelmo, Trygve (1944), The probability approach in econometrics. Supplement to Econometrica 12:1-115.

Kalman, Rudolf (1994), Randomness Reexamined. Modeling, Identification and Control 3:141-151.

Keynes, John Maynard (1973 (1921)), A Treatise on Probability. Volume VIII of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, London: Macmillan.

Pålsson Syll, Lars (2007), John Maynard Keynes. Stockholm: SNS Förlag.

Salsburg, David (2001), The Lady Tasting Tea. Henry Holt.

von Mises, Richard (1957), Probability, Statistics and Truth. New York: Dover Publications.

from Lars Syll

In econometrics one often gets the feeling that many of its practitioners think of it as a kind of automatic inferential machine: input data and out comes casual knowledge. This is like pulling a rabbit from a hat. Great — but first you have to put the rabbit in the hat. And this is where assumptions come in to the picture.

The assumption of imaginary “superpopulations” is one of the many dubious assumptions used in modern econometrics, and as Clint Ballingerhas highlighted, this is a particularly questionable rabbit pulling assumption:

Inferential statistics are based on taking a random sample from a larger population … and attempting to draw conclusions about a) the larger population from that data and b) the probability that the relations between measured variables are consistent or are artifacts of the sampling procedure.

However, in political science, economics, development studies and related fields the data often represents as complete an amount of data as can be measured from the real world (an ‘apparent population’). It is not the result of a random sampling from a larger population. Nevertheless, social scientists treat such data as the result of random sampling.  

Because there is no source of further cases a fiction is propagated—the data is treated as if it were from a larger population, a ‘superpopulation’ where repeated realizations of the data are imagined. Imagine there could be more worlds with more cases and the problem is fixed …

What ‘draw’ from this imaginary superpopulation does the real-world set of cases we have in hand represent? This is simply an unanswerable question. The current set of cases could be representative of the superpopulation, and it could be an extremely unrepresentative sample, a one in a million chance selection from it …

The problem is not one of statistics that need to be fixed. Rather, it is a problem of the misapplication of inferential statistics to non-inferential situations.

As social scientists – and economists – we have to confront the all-important question of how to handle uncertainty and randomness. Should we define randomness with probability? If we do, we have to accept that to speak of randomness we also have to presuppose the existence of nomological probability machines, since probabilities cannot be spoken of – and actually, to be strict, do not at all exist – without specifying such system-contexts. Accepting Haavelmo’s domain of probability theory and sample space of infinite populations – just as Fisher’s “hypothetical infinite population, of which the actual data are regarded as constituting a random sample”, von Mises’s “collective” or Gibbs’s ”ensemble” – also implies that judgments are made on the basis of observations that are actually never made!

Infinitely repeated trials or samplings never take place in the real world. So that cannot be a sound inductive basis for a science with aspirations of explaining real-world socio-economic processes, structures or events. It’s not tenable.

As David Salsburg once noted – in his lovely The Lady Tasting Tea – on probability theory:

[W]e assume there is an abstract space of elementary things called ‘events’ … If a measure on the abstract space of events fulfills certain axioms, then it is a probability. To use probability in real life, we have to identify this space of events and do so with sufficient specificity to allow us to actually calculate probability measurements on that space … Unless we can identify [this] abstract space, the probability statements that emerge from statistical analyses will have many different and sometimes contrary meanings.

Just as e. g. John Maynard Keynes and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Salsburg is very critical of the way social scientists – including economists and econometricians – uncritically and without arguments have come to simply assume that one can apply probability distributions from statistical theory on their own area of research:

Probability is a measure of sets in an abstract space of events. All the mathematical properties of probability can be derived from this definition. When we wish to apply probability to real life, we need to identify that abstract space of events for the particular problem at hand … It is not well established when statistical methods are used for observational studies … If we cannot identify the space of events that generate the probabilities being calculated, then one model is no more valid than another … As statistical models are used more and more for observational studies to assist in social decisions by government and advocacy groups, this fundamental failure to be able to derive probabilities without ambiguity will cast doubt on the usefulness of these methods.

This importantly also means that if you cannot show that data satisfies all the conditions of the probabilistic nomological machine – including e. g. the distribution of the deviations corresponding to a normal curve – then the statistical inferences used, lack sound foundations.

In his great book Statistical Models and Causal Inference: A Dialogue with the Social SciencesDavid Freedman also touched on these fundamental problems, arising when you try to apply statistical models outside overly simple nomological machines like coin tossing and roulette wheels (emphasis added):

Lurking behind the typical regression model will be found a host of such assumptions; without them, legitimate inferences cannot be drawn from the model. There are statistical procedures for testing some of these assumptions. However, the tests often lack the power to detect substantial failures. Furthermore, model testing may become circular; breakdowns in assumptions are detected, and the model is redefined to accommodate. In short, hiding the problems can become a major goal of model building.

Using models to make predictions of the future, or the results of interventions, would be a valuable corrective. Testing the model on a variety of data sets – rather than fitting refinements over and over again to the same data set – might be a good second-best … Built into the equation is a model for non-discriminatory behavior: the coefficient d vanishes. If the company discriminates, that part of the model cannot be validated at all.

Regression models are widely used by social scientists to make causal inferences; such models are now almost a routine way of demonstrating counterfactuals.However, the “demonstrations” generally turn out to depend on a series of untested, even unarticulated, technical assumptions. Under the circumstances, reliance on model outputs may be quite unjustified. Making the ideas of validation somewhat more precise is a serious problem in the philosophy of science. That models should correspond to reality is, after all, a useful but not totally straightforward idea – with some history to it. Developing appropriate models is a serious problem in statistics; testing the connection to the phenomena is even more serious …

In our days, serious arguments have been made from data. Beautiful, delicate theorems have been proved, although the connection with data analysis often remains to be established. And an enormous amount of fiction has been produced, masquerading as rigorous science.

And as if this wasn’t enough, one could — as we’ve seen — also seriously wonder what kind of “populations” these statistical and econometric models ultimately are based on. Why should we as social scientists – and not as pure mathematicians working with formal-axiomatic systems without the urge to confront our models with real target systems – unquestioningly accept Haavelmo’s “infinite population”, Fisher’s “hypothetical infinite population”, von Mises’s “collective” or Gibbs’s ”ensemble”?

Of course one could treat our observational or experimental data as random samples from real populations. I have no problem with that. But probabilistic econometrics does not content itself with that kind of populations. Instead it creates imaginary populations of “parallel universes” and assume that our data are random samples from that kind of populations.

But this is actually nothing else but hand-waving! And it is inadequate for real science. As David Freedman writes in Statistical Models and Causal Inference (emphasis added):

With this approach, the investigator does not explicitly define a population that could in principle be studied, with unlimited resources of time and money. The investigator merely assumes that such a population exists in some ill-defined sense. And there is a further assumption, that the data set being analyzed can be treated as if it were based on a random sample from the assumed population. These are convenient fictions… Nevertheless, reliance on imaginary populations is widespread. Indeed regression models are commonly used to analyze convenience samples … The rhetoric of imaginary populations is seductive because it seems to free the investigator from the necessity of understanding how data were generated.

In social sciences — including economics — it’s always wise to ponder C. S. Peirce’s remark that universes are not as common as peanuts …