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Related papers: Trustworthiness of statistical inference

200 papers

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-23 Glenn Shafer

A/B tests are typically analyzed via frequentist p-values and confidence intervals; but these inferences are wholly unreliable if users endogenously choose samples sizes by *continuously monitoring* their tests. We define *always valid*…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-07-18 Ramesh Johari , Leo Pekelis , David J. Walsh

Instrumental variables have been widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. Existing confidence intervals for causal effects based on instrumental variables assume that all of the putative instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-03 Hyunseung Kang , Youjin Lee , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

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…

Applications · Statistics 2013-03-05 Michael Wood

A great deal of effort has been devoted to reducing the risk of spurious scientific discoveries, from the use of sophisticated validation techniques, to deep statistical methods for controlling the false discovery rate in multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Cynthia Dwork , Vitaly Feldman , Moritz Hardt , Toniann Pitassi , Omer Reingold , Aaron Roth

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…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2026-05-08 Reason Machete

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-29 Jona Sassenhagen , Phillip M. Alday

The last decades saw dramatic progress in brain research. These advances were often buttressed by probing single variables to make circumscribed discoveries, typically through null hypothesis significance testing. New ways for generating…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-03-26 Danilo Bzdok , John Ioannidis

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-13 Sander Greenland

Statistical inference has undergone a profound transformation over the past decade, evolving from a significance-testing paradigm toward a comprehensive, transparency-driven framework embedded within the broader open science ecosystem.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-07 Aswini Kumar Patra

This paper calls attention to the missing component of the recommender system evaluation process: Statistical Inference. There is active research in several components of the recommender system evaluation process: selecting baselines,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Ngozi Ihemelandu , Michael D. Ekstrand

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…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2011-09-30 Jacob Levman

A standard practice in statistical hypothesis testing is to mention the p-value alongside the accept/reject decision. We show the advantages of mentioning an e-value instead. With p-values, it is not clear how to use an extreme observation…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-04 Peter Grünwald

$P$-values have been the focus of considerable criticism based on various considerations. Still, the $P$-value represents one of the most commonly used statistical tools. When assessing the suitability of a single hypothesized distribution,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-01-13 Michael Evans , Gun Ho Jang

Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Zhipeng Zhang , Kai Li

Selective inference is a subfield of statistics that enables valid inference after selection of a data-dependent question. In this paper, we introduce selectively dominant p-values, a class of p-values that allow practitioners to easily…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-22 Anav Sood

Recent research increasingly brings to question the appropriateness of using predictive tools in complex, real-world tasks. While a growing body of work has explored ways to improve value alignment in these tools, comparatively less work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Amanda Coston , Anna Kawakami , Haiyi Zhu , Ken Holstein , Hoda Heidari

Several scientific fields including psychology are undergoing a replication crisis. There are many reasons for this problem, one of which is a misuse of p-values. There are several alternatives to p-values, and in this paper we describe a…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-05 Brian D. Segal

Knowing when a classifier's prediction can be trusted is useful in many applications and critical for safely using AI. While the bulk of the effort in machine learning research has been towards improving classifier performance,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Heinrich Jiang , Been Kim , Melody Y. Guan , Maya Gupta

The concept of intrinsic credibility has been recently introduced to check the credibility of "out of the blue" findings without any prior support. A significant result is deemed intrinsically credible if it is in conflict with a sceptical…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-08 Leonhard Held