Related papers: When More Is Less: Pitfalls of significance testin…
Null hypothesis significance testing remains popular despite decades of concern about misuse and misinterpretation. We believe that much of the problem is due to language: significance testing has little to do with other meanings of the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 --…
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…
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…
The high fraction of published results that turn out to be incorrect is a major concern of today's science. This paper contributes to the understanding of this problem in two independent directions. First, Johnson's recent claim that…
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…
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…
Attacks on the P-value are nothing new, but the recent attacks are increasingly more serious. They come from more mainstream sources, with widening targets such as a call to retire the significance testing altogether. While well meaning, I…
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…
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…
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…
Statistical significance testing is widely accepted as a means to assess how well a difference in effectiveness reflects an actual difference between systems, as opposed to random noise because of the selection of topics. According to…
While P-values are widely abused, they are a useful tool for many purposes; banning them is analogous to banning scalpels because most people do not know how to perform surgery. Many reported P-values are not genuine P-values, for a variety…
Since its debut in the 18th century, the P-value has been an important part of hypothesis testing-based scientific discoveries. As the statistical engine accelerates, questions are beginning to be raised, asking to what extent scientific…
Most scientific disciplines use significance testing to draw conclusions about experimental or observational data. This classical approach provides a theoretical guarantee for controlling the number of false positives across a set of…
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…