Related papers: Statistical Significance Testing in Information Re…
Statistical significance tests can provide evidence that the observed difference in performance between two methods is not due to chance. In Information Retrieval, some studies have examined the validity and suitability of such tests for…
Null Hypothesis Significance Testing is the \textit{de facto} tool for assessing effectiveness differences between Information Retrieval systems. Researchers use statistical tests to check whether those differences will generalise to online…
A number of information retrieval studies have been done to assess which statistical techniques are appropriate for comparing systems. However, these studies are focused on TREC-style experiments, which typically have fewer than 100 topics.…
In benchmarking of Information Retrieval systems, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test is often treated as a safer alternative to the t-test. This belief is fueled by textbooks and recommendations that portray Wilcoxon as the proper non-parametric…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It is quite common in modern research, for a researcher to test many hypotheses. The statistical (frequentist) hypothesis testing framework, does not scale with the number of hypotheses in the sense that naively performing many hypothesis…
The evaluation of Information Retrieval (IR) systems typically uses query-document pairs with corresponding human-labelled relevance assessments (qrels). These qrels are used to determine if one system is better than another based on…
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…
Recently, it was shown that most popular IR measures are not interval-scaled, implying that decades of experimental IR research used potentially improper methods, which may have produced questionable results. However, it was unclear if and…
To evaluate Information Retrieval (IR) effectiveness, a possible approach is to use test collections, which are composed of a collection of documents, a set of description of information needs (called topics), and a set of relevant…
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…
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 --…
A new method based on the rejection sampling for finding statistical tests is proposed. This method is conceptually intuitive, easy to implement, and applicable for arbitrary dimension. To illustrate its potential applicability, three…
Since its introduction by Fisher, the method of hypothesis testing that relies on computing error probabilities has witnessed several developments. Perhaps the most significant development was the seminal contributions of Neyman and Pearson…
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…
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…