Studies in the history of probability and statistics XLVIII The Bayesian contributions of Ernest Lhoste

Abstract

The contributions of Ernest Lhoste are largely unknown outside France, and even within that country are not well known. His important contributions were in the two areas of the development of prior distributions that represent little or no information, and a sophisticated posterior analysis for normal and binomial populations. His results are similar to those of Haldane (1948) and Jeffreys (1961), but they appeared much earlier, in 1923. He gave a great deal of thought to how to represent vague prior knowledge and his results represent a significant and unique contribution to Bayesian ideas in the early part of the 20th century.