Monday, June 16, 2014

Warning of the fallacy of p values

" the surprisingly slippery nature of the P value, which is neither as reliable nor as objective as most scientists assume."
"...suggested that most published findings are false"
"P value of 0.05 became enshrined as 'statistically significant', for example. "The P value was never meant to be used the way it's used today,""
"Most scientists would look at his original P value of 0.01 and say that there was just a 1% chance of his result being a false alarm. But they would be wrong. The Pvalue cannot say this: all it can do is summarize the data assuming a specific null hypothesis. It cannot work backwards and make statements about the underlying reality. That requires another piece of information: the odds that a real effect was there in the first place. To ignore this would be like waking up with a headache and concluding that you have a rare brain tumour "


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