Abstract: The article focuses on the discussion of basic approaches to hypotheses testing, which are Fisher, Jeffreys, Neyman, Berger approaches and a new one proposed by the author of this paper and called the constrained Bayesian method (CBM). Wald and Berger sequential tests and the test based on CBM are presented also. The positive and negative aspects of these approaches are considered on the basis of computed examples. Namely, it is shown that CBM has all positive characteristics of the above-listed methods. It is a data-dependent measure like Fisher’s test for making a decision, uses a posteriori probabilities like the Jeffreys test and computes error probabilities Type I and Type II like the Neyman-Pearson’s approach does. Combination of these properties assigns new properties to the decision regions of the offered method. In CBM the observation space contains regions for making the decision and regions for no-making the decision. The regions for no-making the decision are separated into the regions of impossibility of making a decision and the regions of impossibilityof making a unique decision. These properties bring the statistical hypotheses testing rule in CBM much closer to the everyday decision-making rule when, at shortage of necessary information, the acceptance of one of made suppositions is not compulsory. Computed practical examples clearly demonstrate high quality and reliability of CBM. In critical situations, when other tests give opposite decisions, it gives the most logical decision. Moreover, for any information on the basis of which the decision is made, the set of error probabilities is defined for which the decision with given reliability is possible.

Keywords: Hypotheses testing, -value, likelihood ratio, frequentist approaches, Bayesian approach, constrained Bayesian method, decision regions.