Assumption Light Inference

Use inference methods that require fewer fragile assumptions when strong assumptions are unjustified.

The Diagnostic Story

Symptom: The analysis uses a familiar method and returns a precise-looking number, but the data are small and skewed, or ordinal, or outlier-heavy, and the method assumes none of that. Different analysts making equally defensible choices get different answers. Reviewers argue about model validity without pinning down which assumption is actually doing the work.

Pivot: Turn assumption dependence into a visible design choice. Inventory the assumptions behind the planned inference, identify which ones are consequential and least justified, choose a procedure that requires fewer fragile commitments, and frame the result only within the limits that can actually be defended.

Resolution: Conclusions become less brittle because they no longer hang on unverified structural assumptions. Where a robust method yields a weaker claim, that weakness is honest rather than hidden. Method disagreements become productive because they can be mapped to assumption burden rather than professional preference.

Reach for this when you hear…

[clinical trial stats] “The t-test says significant, but with twelve patients and two obvious outliers I want to see the Wilcoxon before I believe it.”

[survey research] “We treated a five-point satisfaction scale like interval data and got a tidy regression — nobody checked whether the distances between points actually mean anything.”

[financial risk analysis] “Our VaR model looked great until we hit a fat-tailed week and realized we'd been assuming normality the whole time.”

Mechanisms / Implementations

• Assumption Audit Checklist
• Bootstrap-Like Checks
• Diagnostic Plot Review
• Median-Based Summaries
• Model Comparison Table
• Nonparametric Tests
• Permutation Tests
• Rank-Based Methods
• Robust Statistics
• Sensitivity Analysis Protocol

Related Abstractions

Abstractions this archetype builds on — directly (a source ingredient) or as a related pattern. Links follow the typed catalog namespace.

Built directly on (3)

• Nonparametric Methods: Distribution-free analysis.
• Robustness: Maintain functionality under stress.
• Uncertainty: Incomplete knowledge.

Also references 12 related abstractions

• Approximation: Good-enough representation.
• Boundedness: Values remain within limits.
• Confidence Intervals: Range of plausible values.
• Hypothesis Testing (Null vs. Alternative): Null vs alternative evaluation.
• Overfitting: Poor generalization.
• Parsimony (Occam's Razor): Prefer simplicity.
• Probability: Quantifies uncertainty and likelihoods.
• Reproducibility & Replicability: Repeatable results.
• Sensitivity Analysis (in Operations Research): Analyze impact of parameter variation.
• Stationarity: Stable statistical properties.

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Variants

Narrower or domain-specific specializations that share this archetype's core structure. Recognized variants are established; candidate variants are provisional.

Rank-Based Inference · mechanism family variant · recognized

Uses order information rather than metric distance when ranks are more defensible than interval-scale assumptions.

Permutation-Based Inference · mechanism family variant · candidate

Uses label rearrangement or randomization logic to build a comparison reference without a parametric sampling distribution.

Outlier-Robust Inference · risk or failure variant · recognized

Uses summaries, comparisons, or estimators that reduce undue dependence on extreme observations while still respecting meaningful extremes.