Related papers: The statistical significance filter leads to overc…
The "significance filter" refers to focusing exclusively on statistically significant results. Since frequentist properties such as unbiasedness and coverage are valid only before the data have been observed, there are no guarantees if we…
Large-scale replication studies like the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) provide invaluable systematic data on scientific replicability, but most analyses and interpretations of the data fail to agree on the definition of…
The high fraction of published results that turn out to be incorrect is a major concern of today's science. This paper contributes to the understanding of this problem in two independent directions. First, Johnson's recent claim that…
A recent proposal to "redefine statistical significance" (Benjamin, et al. Nature Human Behaviour, 2017) claims that false positive rates "would immediately improve" by factors greater than two and replication rates would double simply by…
There is a well-known problem in Null Hypothesis Significance Testing: many statistically significant results fail to replicate in subsequent experiments. We show that this problem arises because standard `point-form null' significance…
When a scientist performs an experiment they normally acquire a set of measurements and are expected to demonstrate that their results are "statistically significant" thus confirming whatever hypothesis they are testing. The main method for…
P-values are widely used in both the social and natural sciences to quantify the statistical significance of observed results. The recent surge of big data research has made the p-value an even more popular tool to test the significance of…
Statistical significance measures the reliability of a result obtained from a random experiment. We investigate the number of repetitions needed for a statistical result to have a certain significance. In the first step, we consider…
Despite its importance to experimental design, statistical power (the probability that, given a real effect, an experiment will reject the null hypothesis) has largely been ignored by the NLP community. Underpowered experiments make it more…
When researchers carry out a null hypothesis significance test, it is tempting to assume that a statistically significant result lowers Prob(H0), the probability of the null hypothesis being true. Technically, such a statement is…
Research often necessitates of samples, yet obtaining large enough samples is not always possible. When it is, the researcher may use one of two methods for deciding upon the required sample size: rules-of-thumb, quick yet uncertain, and…
The Open Science Collaboration recently reported that 36% of published findings from psychological studies were reproducible by independent researchers. We can use this information together with Bayes theorem to estimate the statistical…
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower…
A leading explanation for widespread replication failures is publication bias. I show in a simple model of selective publication that, contrary to common perceptions, the replication rate is unaffected by the suppression of insignificant…
Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Such selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. This paper proposes two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication…
A common, though not recommended statistical practice is to report confidence intervals if and only if they exclude a null value of 0. The resulting filtered confidence intervals generally do not have their nominal confidence level. More…
The controversy about statistical significance vs. scientific relevance is more than 100 years old. But still nowadays null hypothesis significance testing is considered as gold standard in many empirical fields from economics and social…
This paper offers a commentary on the use of notions of statistical significance in choice modelling. We review the reasons for uncertainty in parameter estimates, provide a precise discussion on the computation of measures of uncertainty…
We examine the role of trustworthiness and trust in statistical inference, arguing that it is the extent of trustworthiness in inferential statistical tools which enables trust in the conclusions. Certain tools, such as the p-value and…
We present the expected values from p-value hacking as a choice of the minimum p-value among $m$ independents tests, which can be considerably lower than the "true" p-value, even with a single trial, owing to the extreme skewness of the…