Related papers: More accurate tests for the statistical significan…
Statistical significance testing is used in natural language processing (NLP) to determine whether the results of a study or experiment are likely to be due to chance or if they reflect a genuine relationship. A key step in significance…
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…
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 lot of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) research is of an empirical nature. Nevertheless, statistical significance testing (SST) is still not widely used. This endangers true progress, as seeming improvements over a baseline…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The F-measure or F-score is one of the most commonly used single number measures in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, but it is based on a mistake, and the flawed assumptions render it unsuitable for…
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…
The controversy about statistical significance vs. scientific relevance is more than 100 years old. But still nowadays null hypothesis significance testing is considered as gold standard in many empirical fields from economics and social…
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…
The meaning of randomization tests has become obscure in statistics education and practice over the last century. This article makes a fresh attempt at rectifying this core concept of statistics. A new term -- "quasi-randomization test" --…
This paper offers a commentary on the use of notions of statistical significance in choice modelling. We review the reasons for uncertainty in parameter estimates, provide a precise discussion on the computation of measures of uncertainty…
Research often necessitates of samples, yet obtaining large enough samples is not always possible. When it is, the researcher may use one of two methods for deciding upon the required sample size: rules-of-thumb, quick yet uncertain, and…