Related papers: What to do if N is two?
Advances in biology have mostly relied on theories that were subsequently revised, expanded or eventually refuted using experimental and other means. Theoretical biology used to primarily provide a basis to rationally examine the frameworks…
It is widely believed that theory is useful in physics because it describes simple systems and that strictly empirical phenomenological approaches are necessary for complex biological and social systems. Here we prove based upon an analysis…
Traditional signal processing methods relying on mathematical data generation models have been cast aside in favour of deep neural networks, which require vast amounts of data. Since the theoretical sample complexity is nearly impossible to…
That science and other domains are now largely data-driven means virtually unlimited opportunities for statisticians. With great power comes responsibility, so it's imperative that statisticians ensure that the methods being developing to…
Suppose you are told that taking a statin will reduce your risk of a heart attack or stroke by 3% in the next ten years, or that women have better emotional intelligence than men. You may wonder how accurate the 3% is, or how confident we…
The principle of maximum entropy provides a useful method for inferring statistical mechanics models from observations in correlated systems, and is widely used in a variety of fields where accurate data are available. While the assumptions…
This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…
What fascinates us about animal behavior is its richness and complexity, but understanding behavior and its neural basis requires a simpler description. Traditionally, simplification has been imposed by training animals to engage in a…
A fundamental assumption of classical hypothesis testing is that the significance threshold $\alpha$ is chosen independently from the data. The validity of confidence intervals likewise relies on choosing $\alpha$ beforehand. We point out…
In many causal inference applications, only one or a few units (or clusters of units) are treated. An important challenge in such settings is that standard inference methods relying on asymptotic theory may be unreliable, even with large…
One of the most critical problems we face in the study of biological systems is building accurate statistical descriptions of them. This problem has been particularly challenging because biological systems typically contain large numbers of…
In recent years, it has become common practice in neuroscience to use networks to summarize relational information in a set of measurements, typically assumed to be reflective of either functional or structural relationships between regions…
In this paper, we propose a new spectral-based approach to hypothesis testing for populations of networks. The primary goal is to develop a test to determine whether two given samples of networks come from the same random model or…
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…
When interpreting A/B tests, we typically focus only on the statistically significant results and take them by face value. This practice, termed post-selection inference in the statistical literature, may negatively affect both point…
One-sided t-tests are commonly used in the neuroimaging field, but two-sided tests should be the default unless a researcher has a strong reason for using a one-sided test. Here we extend our previous work on cluster false positive rates,…
Multitype branching processes with immigration in one type are used to model the dynamics of stage-structured plant populations. Parametric inference is first carried out when count data of all types are observed. Statistical…
This article emphasizes that NLP as a science seeks to make inferences about the performance effects that result from applying one method (compared to another method) in the processing of natural language. Yet NLP research in practice…
Statistical models for describing the probability distribution over the states of biological systems are commonly used for dimensional reduction. Among these models, pairwise models are very attractive in part because they can be fit using…
Neurons can code for multiple variables simultaneously and neuroscientists are often interested in classifying neurons based on their receptive field properties. Statistical models provide powerful tools for determining the factors…