Related papers: Comment: How Should Indirect Evidence Be Used?
Familiar statistical tests and estimates are obtained by the direct observation of cases of interest: a clinical trial of a new drug, for instance, will compare the drug's effects on a relevant set of patients and controls. Sometimes,…
There are various approaches to the problem of how one is supposed to conduct a statistical analysis. Different analyses can lead to contradictory conclusions in some problems so this is not a satisfactory state of affairs. It seems that…
One can argue that one of the main roles of the subject of statistics is to characterize what the evidence in collected data says about questions of scientific interest. There are two broad questions that we will refer to as the estimation…
This short text tried to establish a big picture of what evidential statistics is about and how an ideal inference method should behave. Moreover, by examining shortcomings of some of the currently used methods for measuring evidence and…
I present a critique of the methods used in a typical paper. This leads to three broad conclusions about the conventional use of statistical methods. First, results are often reported in an unnecessarily obscure manner. Second, the null…
Communication is essential for the advancement of Science. Technology advances and the proliferation of personal devices have changed the ways in which people communicate in all aspects of life. Scientific communication has also been…
Textbooks on statistics emphasize care and precision, via concepts such as reliability and validity in measurement, random sampling and treatment assignment in data collection, and causal identification and bias in estimation. But how do…
A growing body of literature attempts to learn about contagion using observational (i.e. non-experimental) data collected from a single social network. While the conclusions of these studies may be correct, the methods rely on assumptions…
Often information relevant to a decision is summarized in an index number. This paper explores conditions under which conclusions using index numbers are relevant to the decision that needs to be made. Specifically it explores the idea that…
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using ``simple and objective'' methods is increasingly prevalent today. The ``simple and…
The persistent issue of wrongful convictions in the United States emphasizes the need for scrutiny and improvement of the criminal justice system. While statistical methods for the evaluation of forensic evidence, including glass,…
The customary use of P-values in scientific research has been attacked as being ill-conceived, and the utility of P-values has been derided. This paper reviews common misconceptions about P-values and their alleged deficits as indices of…
Significance tests are probably the most extended form of inference in empirical research, and significance is often interpreted as providing greater informational content than non-significance. In this article we show, however, that…
What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly…
The study of associations and their causal explanations is a central research activity whose methodology varies tremendously across fields. Even within specialized subfields, comparisons across textbooks and journals reveals that the basics…
Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…
Bad statistics make research papers unreproducible and misleading. For the most part, the reasons for such misusage of numerical data have been found and addressed years ago by experts and proper practical solutions have been presented…
We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…
In narrative synthesis of evidence, it can be the case that the only quantitative measures available concerning the efficacy of an intervention is the direction of the effect, i.e. whether it is positive or negative. In such situations, the…
The features of a logically sound approach to a theory of statistical reasoning are discussed. A particular approach that satisfies these criteria is reviewed. This is seen to involve selection of a model, model checking, elicitation of a…