{"paper":{"title":"The subtle statistics of the distance ladder: On the distance prior and selection effects","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["astro-ph.GA"],"primary_cat":"astro-ph.CO","authors_text":"Harry Desmond, Indranil Banik, Jos\\'e Antonio N\\'ajera, Richard Stiskalek","submitted_at":"2025-11-05T11:55:20Z","abstract_excerpt":"Statistical methodology is rarely considered significant in distance-ladder studies or a potential contributor to the Hubble tension. We suggest it should be, highlighting two appreciable issues. First, astronomical distances are inferred latent parameters, requiring a prior. We show that the (often implicit) uniform priors on distance moduli common to Bayesian distance-ladder analyses bias distances low due to objects being uniformly distributed in volume, which biases the Hubble constant high. Frequentist $\\chi^2$ methods are unbiased for volume- or redshift-limited samples only if the redsh"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2511.03394","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2511.03394/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}