Related papers: Statistical witchhunts: Science, justice & the p-v…
Statistical hypotheses are translations of scientific hypotheses into statements about one or more distributions, often concerning their centre. Tests that assess statistical hypotheses of centre implicitly assume a specific centre, e.g.,…
The last decade saw the emergence of systematic large-scale replication projects in the social and behavioral sciences, (Camerer et al., 2016, 2018; Ebersole et al., 2016; Klein et al., 2014, 2018; Collaboration, 2015). These projects were…
Several tasks in information retrieval (IR) rely on assumptions regarding the distribution of some property (such as term frequency) in the data being processed. This thesis argues that such distributional assumptions can lead to incorrect…
Counterfactual inference considers a hypothetical intervention in a parallel world that shares some evidence with the factual world. If the evidence specifies a conditional distribution on a manifold, counterfactuals may be analytically…
This commentary proposes a framework for understanding the role of statistics in policy-making, regulation, and bureaucratic systems. I introduce the concept of "ex ante policy," describing statistical rules and procedures designed before…
Statistical analysis of repeat misprints in scientific citations leads to the conclusion that about 80% of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in othe papers. Based on this finding a mathematical theory of…
Regression methods dominate the practice of biostatistical analysis, but biostatistical training emphasises the details of regression models and methods ahead of the purposes for which such modelling might be useful. More broadly,…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
This paper compares the higher criticism statistic (Donoho and Jin [Ann. Statist. 32 (2004) 962-994]), a modification of the higher criticism statistic also suggested by Donoho and Jin, and two statistics of the Berk-Jones [Z. Wahrsch.…
I proposed (8, 1, 3) that p values should be supplemented by an estimate of the false positive risk (FPR). FPR was defined as the probability that, if you claim that there is a real effect on the basis of p value from a single unbiased…
Verifying that a statistically significant result is scientifically meaningful is not only good scientific practice, it is a natural way to control the Type I error rate. Here we introduce a novel extension of the p-value - a…
With the explosive growth of online social media, the ancient problem of information disorders interfering with news diffusion has surfaced with a renewed intensity threatening our democracies, public health, and news outlets' credibility.…
The problem of statistical inference in its various forms has been the subject of decades-long extensive research. Most of the effort has been focused on characterizing the behavior as a function of the number of available samples, with far…
Imbalanced problems can arise in different real-world situations, and to address this, certain strategies in the form of resampling or balancing algorithms are proposed. This issue has largely been studied in the context of classification,…
Mark-and-Recapture is a methodology from Population Biology to estimate the number of a species without counting every individual. This is done by multiple samplings of the species using traps and discounting the instances that were caught…
The correlation and interactions among different biological entities comprise the biological system. Although already revealed interactions contribute to the understanding of different existing systems, researchers face many questions…
Science is facing a reproducibility crisis. Previous work has proposed incorporating data analysis replications into classrooms as a potential solution. However, despite the potential benefits, it is unclear whether this approach is…
We study the societal impact of pseudo-scientific assumptions for predicting the behavior of people in a straightforward application of machine learning to risk prediction in financial lending. This use case also exemplifies the impact of…
Counterfactual explanations are a prominent example of post-hoc interpretability methods in the explainable Artificial Intelligence research domain. They provide individuals with alternative scenarios and a set of recommendations to achieve…
The statistics community, which has traditionally lacked a transparent and open peer-review system, faces a challenge of inconsistent paper quality, with some published work containing substantial errors. This problem resonates with…