A new Bayesian procedure for testing point null hypotheses

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Testing point null hypotheses is a very common activity in various applied situations. However, the existing Bayesian testing procedure may give evidence which does not agree with the classical frequentist p-value in many point null testing situations. A typical example for this is the well known Lindley’s paradox (Lindley in Biometrika 44:187–192, 1957). In this paper we propose an alternative testing procedure in the Bayesian framework. It is shown that for many classical testing examples, the Bayesian evidence derived by our new testing procedure is not contradictory to its frequentist counterpart any more. In fact, the new Bayesian evidence under the noninformative prior is usually coincident with the frequentist observed significance level.