In a 1935 paper, and in his book Theory of Probability, Jeffreys developed a methodology for quantifying the evidence in favor of a scientific theory. The centerpiece was a number, now called the Bayes factor, which is the posterior odds of the null hypothesis when the prior probability on the null is one-half. Although there has been much discussion of Bayesian hypothesis testing in the context of criticism of P -values, less attention has been given to the Bayes factor as a practical tool of applied statistics. In this paper we review and discuss the uses of Bayes factors in the context of five scientific applications in genetics, sports, ecology, sociology and psychology.

... In this article we present the general outlook and discuss general families of elaborations for use in practice; the exponential connection elaboration plays a key role. We then describe model elaborations for use in diagnosing: departures from normality, goodness of fit in generalized linear models, and variable selection in regression and outlier detection. We illustrate our approach with two applications.

The Schwarz information criterion (SIC, BIC, SBC) is one of the most widely known and used tools in statistical model selection. The criterion was derived by Schwarz (1978) to serve as an asymptotic approximation to a transformation of the Bayesian posterior probability of a candidate model. Although the original derivation assumes that the observed data is independent, identically distributed, and arising from a probability distribution in the regular exponential family, SIC has traditionally been used in a much larger scope of model selection problems. To better justify the widespread applicability of SIC, we derive the criterion in a very general framework: one which does not assume any specific form for the likelihood function, but only requires that it satisfies certain non-restrictive regularity conditions.