Confidence intervals get top billing as the alternative to significance. But beware: confidence intervals rely on the same math as significance and share the same shortcominings. Confidence intervals don’t tell where the true effect lies even probabilistically. What they do…
Read MoreIn Frequentist statistical inference, the p-value is used as a measure of how incompatible the data are with the null hypothesis. When the null hypothesis is fixed at a point, the test statistic reports a distance from the sample statistic…
Read MoreLike many others, I was aware that there was controversy over null-hypothesis statistical testing. Nevertheless, I was shocked to learn that leading figures in the American Statistical Association (ASA) recently called for abolishing the term “statistical significance”. In an editorial…
Read MoreAn oft-overlooked detail in the significance debate is the challenge of calculating correct p-values and confidence intervals, the favored statistics of the two sides. Standard methods rely on assumptions about how the data were generated and can be way off…
Read More[From the preprint “Abandoning statistical significance is both sensible and practical” by Valentin Amrhein, Andrew Gelman, Sander Greenland, and Blakely McShane, available at PeerJ Preprints] “Dr Ioannidis writes against our proposals to abandon statistical significance…” “…we disagree that a statistical…
Read More[From the paper “The practical alternative to the p-value is the correctly used p-value” by Daniël Lakens, posted at PsyArXiv Preprints] “I do not think it is useful to tell researchers what they want to know. Instead, we should teach…
Read More[From the article “The Importance of Predefined Rules and Prespecified Statistical Analyses: Do Not Abandon Significance” by John Ioannidis, published in JAMA] “A recent proposal to ban statistical significance gained campaign-level momentum in a commentary with 854 recruited signatories. The…
Read More[From the article “Stats Experts Plead: Just Say No to P-Hacking” by Dalmeet Singh Chawla, published in Undark] “For decades, researchers have used a statistical measure called the p-value — a widely-debated statistic that even scientists find difficult to define — that is…
Read More[From the introductory editorial “Moving to a World Beyond ‘p < 0.05’” by Ronald Wasserstein, Allen Schirm and Nicole Lazar, published in The American Statistician] “Some of you exploring this special issue of The American Statistician might be wondering if…
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