Related papers: Inference at Scale Significance Testing for Large …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test are commonly employed in one sample and two sample mean tests for one-dimensional hypothesis problems. For high-dimensional mean test problems, we calculate the asymptotic…
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…
The parametric Welch $t$-test and the non-parametric Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test are the most commonly used two independent sample means tests. More recent testing approaches include the non-parametric, empirical likelihood and exponential…
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…
The Wilcoxon Signed Rank test is typically called upon when testing whether a symmetric distribution has a specified centre and the Gaussianity is in question. As with all insurance policies it comes with a cost, even if small, in terms of…
Hypothesis tests are a crucial statistical tool for data mining and are the workhorse of scientific research in many fields. Here we present a differentially private analogue of the classic Wilcoxon signed-rank hypothesis test, which is…
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…
In scientific research, many hypotheses relate to the comparison of two independent groups. Usually, it is of interest to use a design (i.e., the allocation of sample sizes $m$ and $n$ for fixed $N = m + n$) that maximizes the power of the…
A sequence of recent papers has considered the role of measurement scales in information retrieval (IR) experimentation, and presented the argument that (only) uniform-step interval scales should be used, and hence that well-known metrics…
Sampling-based search, a simple paradigm for utilizing test-time compute, involves generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best one -- typically by having models self-verify each response for correctness. In this paper, we…
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…
There is a well-known problem in Null Hypothesis Significance Testing: many statistically significant results fail to replicate in subsequent experiments. We show that this problem arises because standard `point-form null' significance…
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…
Relevance labels, which indicate whether a search result is valuable to a searcher, are key to evaluating and optimising search systems. The best way to capture the true preferences of users is to ask them for their careful feedback on…
We develop a new rank-based approach for univariate two-sample testing in the presence of missing data which makes no assumptions about the missingness mechanism. This approach is a theoretical extension of the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test…