Related papers: I can see clearly now: reinterpreting statistical …
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…
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…
A popular approach to significance testing proposes to decide whether the given hypothesized statistical model is likely to be true (or false). Statistical decision theory provides a basis for this approach by requiring every significance…
In many fields of research null hypothesis significance tests and p values are the accepted way of assessing the degree of certainty with which research results can be extrapolated beyond the sample studied. However, there are very serious…
A large fraction of papers in the climate literature includes erroneous uses of significance tests. A Bayesian analysis is presented to highlight the meaning of significance tests and why typical misuse occurs. It is concluded that a…
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…
While Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) remains a widely used statistical tool, it suffers from several shortcomings in its common usage, such as conflating statistical and practical significance, the formulation of inappropriate…
This paper raises concerns about the advantages of using statistical significance tests in research assessments as has recently been suggested in the debate about proper normalization procedures for citation indicators. Statistical…
The established language for statistical testing --- significance levels, power, and p-values --- is overly complicated and deceptively conclusive. Even teachers of statistics and scientists who use statistics misinterpret the results of…
Null hypothesis statistical significance tests (NHST) are widely used in quantitative research in the empirical sciences including scientometrics. Nevertheless, since their introduction nearly a century ago significance tests have been…
Null hypothesis significance tests and p values are widely used despite very strong arguments against their use in many contexts. Confidence intervals are often recommended as an alternative, but these do not achieve the objective of…
In cell biology, statistical analysis means testing the hypothesis that there was no effect. This weak form of hypothesis testing neglects effect size, is universally misinterpreted, and is disastrously prone to error when combined with…
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…
After some general remarks about the interrelation between philosophical and statistical thinking, the discussion centres largely on significance tests. These are defined as the calculation of $p$-values rather than as formal procedures for…
Null hypothesis statistical significance testing (NHST) is the dominant approach for evaluating results from randomized controlled trials. Whereas NHST comes with long-run error rate guarantees, its main inferential tool -- the $p$-value --…
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…
Experimental research on behavior and cognition frequently rests on stimulus or subject selection where not all characteristics can be fully controlled, even when attempting strict matching. For example, when contrasting patients to…
Statistical significance testing of differences in values of metrics like recall, precision and balanced F-score is a necessary part of empirical natural language processing. Unfortunately, we find in a set of experiments that many commonly…
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…
The meaning of randomization tests has become obscure in statistics education and practice over the last century. This article makes a fresh attempt at rectifying this core concept of statistics. A new term -- "quasi-randomization test" --…