Order-Restricted Inference

A wide variety of statistical techniques have proven useful in biological and environmental studies. Frequently, these techniques can be improved upon and/or made more powerful if the prior knowledge that certain parameters satisfy an order restriction can be incorporated into the analysis. Moreover, since the existence and implications of orderings can be easily grasped and interpreted by even casual readers and observers, the ability to identify such structure can be especially important. Such structure may exist in many ways. Two possibilities that have been widely discussed are the presence of ordered parameters and the identification of ordered distributions.