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Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
Context: Using student subjects in empirical studies has been discussed extensively from a methodological perspective in Software Engineering (SE), but there is a lack of similar discussion surrounding ethical aspects of doing so. As…
In computational biology and other sciences, researchers are frequently faced with a choice between several computational methods for performing data analyses. Benchmarking studies aim to rigorously compare the performance of different…
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…
How many experimental studies would have come to different conclusions had they been run on larger samples? I show how to estimate the expected number of statistically significant results that a set of experiments would have reported had…
Combining p-values from independent statistical tests is a popular approach to meta-analysis, particularly when the data underlying the tests are either no longer available or are difficult to combine. A diverse range of p-value combination…
Practical problems with missing data are common, and statistical methods have been developed concerning the validity and/or efficiency of statistical procedures. On a central focus, there have been longstanding interests on the mechanism…
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning has attracted substantial attention in both academic research and industrial practice. However, the two communities often evaluate models under markedly different conditions.…
The stochastic nature of iterative optimization heuristics leads to inherently noisy performance measurements. Since these measurements are often gathered once and then used repeatedly, the number of collected samples will have a…
Experimental and observational studies often lead to spurious association between the outcome and independent variables describing the intervention, because of confounding to third-party factors. Even in randomized clinical trials,…
We show that publishing results using the statistical significance filter---publishing only when the p-value is less than 0.05---leads to a vicious cycle of overoptimistic expectation of the replicability of results. First, we show…
The American Statistical Association (ASA) statement on statistical significance and P-values \cite{wasserstein2016asa} cautioned statisticians against making scientific decisions solely on the basis of traditional P-values. The statement…
The energy test method is a multi-dimensional test of whether two samples are consistent with arising from the same underlying population, through the calculation of a single test statistic (called the $T$-value). The method has recently…
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…
We examine the role of trustworthiness and trust in statistical inference, arguing that it is the extent of trustworthiness in inferential statistical tools which enables trust in the conclusions. Certain tools, such as the p-value and…
We present the results of a large number of simulation studies regarding the power of various goodness-of-fit as well as non-parametric two-sample tests for multivariate data. In two dimensions this includes both continuous and discrete…
The customary use of P-values in scientific research has been attacked as being ill-conceived, and the utility of P-values has been derided. This paper reviews common misconceptions about P-values and their alleged deficits as indices of…
Classification and clustering are both important topics in statistical learning. A natural question herein is whether predefined classes are really different from one another, or whether clusters are really there. Specifically, we may be…
The problem of detecting changes in covariance for a single pair of features has been studied in some detail, but may be limited in importance or general applicability. In contrast, testing equality of covariance matrices of a {\it set} of…
It can be insightful to extend qualitative studies with a secondary quantitative analysis (where the former suggests insightful questions that the latter can answer). Documenting developer beliefs should be the start, not the end, of…