Monthly Archives: January 2015

2015 Saturday Night Brainstorming and Task Forces: (4th draft)

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Mayo
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TFSI workgroup

Saturday Night Brainstorming: The TFSI on NHST–part reblog from here and here, with a substantial 2015 update!

Each year leaders of the movement to “reform” statistical methodology in psychology, social science, and other areas of applied statistics get together around this time for a brainstorming session. They review the latest from the Task Force on Statistical Inference (TFSI), propose new regulations they would like to see adopted, not just by the APA publication manual any more, but all science journals! Since it’s Saturday night, let’s listen in on part of an (imaginary) brainstorming session of the New Reformers. 

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Frustrated that the TFSI has still not banned null hypothesis significance testing (NHST)–a fallacious version of statistical significance tests that dares to violate Fisher’s first rule: It’s illicit to move directly from statistical to substantive effects–the New Reformers have created, and very successfully published in, new meta-level research paradigms designed expressly to study (statistically!) a central question: have the carrots and sticks of reward and punishment been successful in decreasing the use of NHST, and promoting instead use of confidence intervals, power calculations, and meta-analysis of effect sizes? Or not?  

Most recently, the group has helped successfully launch a variety of “replication and reproducibility projects”. Having discovered how much the reward structure encourages bad statistics and gaming the system, they have cleverly pushed to change the reward structure: Failed replications (from a group chosen by a crowd-sourced band of replicationistas ) would not be hidden in those dusty old file drawers, but would be guaranteed to be published without that long, drawn out process of peer review. Do these failed replications indicate the original study was a false positive? or that the replication attempt is a false negative?  It’s hard to say. 

This year, as is typical, there is a new member who is pitching in to contribute what he hopes are novel ideas for reforming statistical practice. In addition, for the first time, there is a science reporter blogging the meeting for her next free lance “bad statistics” piece for a high impact science journal. Notice, it seems this committee only grows, no one has dropped off, in the 3 years I’ve followed them. 

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Pawl: This meeting will come to order. I am pleased to welcome our new member, Dr. Ian Nydes, adding to the medical strength we have recently built with epidemiologist S.C.. In addition, we have a science writer with us today, Jenina Oozo. To familiarize everyone, we begin with a review of old business, and gradually turn to new business.

Franz: It’s so darn frustrating after all these years to see researchers still using NHST methods; some of the newer modeling techniques routinely build on numerous applications of those pesky tests.

Jake: And the premier publication outlets in the social sciences still haven’t mandated the severe reforms sorely needed. Hopefully the new blood, Dr. Ian Nydes, can help us go beyond resurrecting the failed attempts of the past. Continue reading →

Categories: Comedy, reforming the reformers, science communication, Statistical fraudbusting, statistical tests, Statistics | Tags: , , , , , ,

3 YEARS AGO: (JANUARY 2012) MEMORY LANE

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Mayo
3 years ago...

3 years ago…

MONTHLY MEMORY LANE: 3 years ago: January 2012. I mark in red three posts that seem most apt for general background on key issues in this blog.

January 2012

This new, once-a-month, feature began at the blog’s 3-year anniversary in Sept, 2014. I will count U-Phil’s on a single paper as one of the three I highlight (else I’d have to choose between them). I will comment on  3-year old posts from time to time.

This Memory Lane needs a bit of explanation. This blog began largely as a forum to discuss a set of contributions from a conference I organized (with A. Spanos and J. Miller*) “Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science: Where Do (Should) They meet?”at the London School of Economics, Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, CPNSS, in June 2010 (where I am a visitor). Additional papers grew out of conversations initiated soon after (with Andrew Gelman and Larry Wasserman). The conference site is here.  My reflections in this general arena (Sept. 26, 2012) are here.

As articles appeared in a special topic of the on-line journal, Rationality, Markets and Morals (RMM), edited by Max Albert[i]—also a conference participant —I would announce an open invitation to readers to take a couple of weeks to write an extended comment.  Each “U-Phil”–which stands for “U philosophize”- was a contribution to this activity. I plan to go back to that exercise at some point.  Generally I would give a “deconstruction” of the paper first, followed by U-Phils, and then the author gave responses to U-Phils and me as they wished. You can readily search this blog for all the U-Phils and deconstructions**.

I was also keeping a list of issues that we either haven’t taken up, or need to return to. One example here is: Bayesian updating and down dating. Further notes about the origins of this blog are here. I recommend everyone reread Senn’s paper.** 

For newcomers, here’s your chance to catch-up; for old timers,this is philosophy: rereading is essential!

[i] Along with Hartmut Kliemt and Bernd Lahno.

*For a full list of collaborators, sponsors, logisticians, and related collaborations, see the conference page. The full list of speakers is found there as well.

**The U-Phil exchange between Mayo and Senn was published in the same special topic of RIMM. But I still wish to know how we can cultivate “Senn’s-ability.” We could continue that activity as well, perhaps.

Previous 3 YEAR MEMORY LANES:

Dec. 2011
Nov. 2011
Oct. 2011
Sept. 2011 (Within “All She Wrote (so far))

Categories: 3-year memory lane, blog contents, Statistics, Stephen Senn, U-Phil

Trial on Anil Potti’s (clinical) Trial Scandal Postponed Because Lawyers Get the Sniffles (updated)

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Mayo
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Trial in Medical Research Scandal Postponed
By Jay Price

DURHAM, N.C. — A judge in Durham County Superior Court has postponed the first civil trial against Duke University by the estate of a patient who had enrolled in one of a trio of clinical cancer studies that were based on bogus science.

The case is part of what the investigative TV news show “60 Minutes” said could go down in history as one of the biggest medical research frauds ever.

The trial had been scheduled to start Monday, but several attorneys involved contracted flu. Judge Robert C. Ervin hasn’t settled on a new start date, but after a conference call with him Monday night, attorneys in the case said it could be as late as this fall.

Flu? Don’t these lawyers get flu shots? Wasn’t Duke working on a flu vaccine? Delaying til Fall 2015?

The postponement delayed resolution in the long-running case for the two patients still alive among the eight who filed suit. It also prolonged a lengthy public relations headache for Duke Medicine that has included retraction of research papers in major scientific journals, the embarrassing segment on “60 Minutes” and the revelation that the lead scientist had falsely claimed to be a Rhodes Scholar in grant applications and credentials.

Because it’s not considered a class action, the eight cases may be tried individually. The one designated to come first was brought by Walter Jacobs, whose wife, Julie, had enrolled in an advanced stage lung cancer study based on the bad research. She died in 2010.

“We regret that our trial couldn’t go forward on the scheduled date,” said Raleigh attorney Thomas Henson, who is representing Jacobs. “As our filed complaint shows, this case goes straight to the basic rights of human research subjects in clinical trials, and we look forward to having those issues at the forefront of the discussion when we are able to have our trial rescheduled.”

It all began in 2006 with research led by a young Duke researcher named Anil Potti. He claimed to have found genetic markers in tumors that could predict which cancer patients might respond well to what form of cancer therapy. The discovery, which one senior Duke administrator later said would have been a sort of Holy Grail of cancer research if it had been accurate, electrified other scientists in the field.

Then, starting in 2007, came the three clinical trials aimed at testing the approach. These enrolled more than 100 lung and breast cancer patients, and were eventually expected to enroll hundreds more.

Duke shut them down permanently in 2010 after finding serious problems with Potti’s science.

Now some of the patients – or their estates, since many have died from their illnesses – are suing Duke, Potti, his mentor and research collaborator Dr. Joseph Nevins, and various Duke administrators. The suit alleges, among other things, that they had engaged in a systematic plan to commercially develop cancer tests worth billions of dollars while using science that they knew or should have known to be fraudulent.

The latest revelation in the case, based on documents that emerged from the lawsuit and first reported in the Cancer Letter, a newsletter that covers cancer research issues, is that a young researcher working with Potti had alerted university officials to problems with the research data two years before the experiments on the cancer patients were stopped. Continue reading →

Categories: junk science, rejected post, Statistics | Tags:

What do these share in common: m&ms, limbo stick, ovulation, Dale Carnegie? Sat night potpourri

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Mayo
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For entertainment only

Here’s the follow-up to my last (reblogged) post. initially here. My take hasn’t changed much from 2013. Should we be labeling some pursuits “for entertainment only”? Why not? (See also a later post on the replication crisis in psych.)

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I had said I would label as pseudoscience or questionable science any enterprise that regularly permits the kind of ‘verification biases’ in the statistical dirty laundry list.  How regularly? (I’ve been asked)

Well, surely if it’s as regular as, say, much of social psychology, it goes over the line. But it’s not mere regularity, it’s the nature of the data, the type of inferences being drawn, and the extent of self-scrutiny and recognition of errors shown (or not shown). The regularity is just a consequence of the methodological holes. My standards may be considerably more stringent than most, but quite aside from statistical issues, I simply do not find hypotheses well-tested if they are based on “experiments” that consist of giving questionnaires. At least not without a lot more self-scrutiny and discussion of flaws than I ever see. (There may be counterexamples.)

Attempts to recreate phenomena of interest in typical social science “labs” leave me with the same doubts. Huge gaps often exist between elicited and inferred results. One might locate the problem under “external validity” but to me it is just the general problem of relating statistical data to substantive claims.

Experimental economists (expereconomists) take lab results plus statistics to warrant sometimes ingenious inferences about substantive hypotheses.  Vernon Smith (of the Nobel Prize in Econ) is rare in subjecting his own results to “stress tests”.  I’m not withdrawing the optimistic assertions he cites from EGEK (Mayo 1996) on Duhem-Quine (e.g., from “Rhetoric and Reality” 2001, p. 29). I’d still maintain, “Literal control is not needed to attribute experimental results correctly (whether to affirm or deny a hypothesis). Enough experimental knowledge will do”.  But that requires piece-meal strategies that accumulate, and at least a little bit of “theory” and/or a decent amount of causal understanding.[1]

I think the generalizations extracted from questionnaires allow for an enormous amount of “reading into” the data. Suddenly one finds the “best” explanation. Questionnaires should be deconstructed for how they may be misinterpreted, not to mention how responders tend to guess what the experimenter is looking for. (I’m reminded of the current hoopla over questionnaires on breadwinners, housework and divorce rates!) I respond with the same eye-rolling to just-so story telling along the lines of evolutionary psychology.

I apply the “Stapel test”: Even if Stapel had bothered to actually carry out the data-collection plans that he so carefully crafted, I would not find the inferences especially telling in the least. Take for example the planned-but-not-implemented study discussed in the recent New York Times article on Stapel: Continue reading →

Categories: junk science, Statistical fraudbusting, Statistics

Some statistical dirty laundry

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Mayo
Objectivity 1: Will the Real Junk Science Please Stand Up?

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It’s an apt time to reblog the “statistical dirty laundry” post from 2013 here. I hope we can take up the recommendations from Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn at the end (Note [5]), which we didn’t last time around.

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I finally had a chance to fully read the 2012 Tilberg Report* on “Flawed Science” last night. Here are some stray thoughts…

1. Slipping into pseudoscience.
The authors of the Report say they never anticipated giving a laundry list of “undesirable conduct” by which researchers can flout pretty obvious requirements for the responsible practice of science. It was an accidental byproduct of the investigation of one case (Diederik Stapel, social psychology) that they walked into a culture of “verification bias”[1]. Maybe that’s why I find it so telling. It’s as if they could scarcely believe their ears when people they interviewed “defended the serious and less serious violations of proper scientific method with the words: that is what I have learned in practice; everyone in my research environment does the same, and so does everyone we talk to at international conferences” (Report 48). So they trot out some obvious rules, and it seems to me that they do a rather good job:

One of the most fundamental rules of scientific research is that an investigation must be designed in such a way that facts that might refute the research hypotheses are given at least an equal chance of emerging as do facts that confirm the research hypotheses. Violations of this fundamental rule, such as continuing an experiment until it works as desired, or excluding unwelcome experimental subjects or results, inevitably tends to confirm the researcher’s research hypotheses, and essentially render the hypotheses immune to the facts…. [T]he use of research procedures in such a way as to ‘repress’ negative results by some means” may be called verification bias. [my emphasis] (Report, 48).

I would place techniques for ‘verification bias’ under the general umbrella of techniques for squelching stringent criticism and repressing severe tests. These gambits make it so easy to find apparent support for one’s pet theory or hypotheses, as to count as no evidence at all (see some from their list ). Any field that regularly proceeds this way I would call a pseudoscience, or non-science, following Popper. “Observations or experiments can be accepted as supporting a theory (or a hypothesis, or a scientific assertion) only if these observations or experiments are severe tests of the theory” (Popper 1994, p. 89). [2] It is unclear at what point a field slips into the pseudoscience realm.

2. A role for philosophy of science?
I am intrigued that one of the final recommendations in the Report is this: Continue reading →

Categories: junk science, reproducibility, spurious p values, Statistics

Power Analysis and Non-Replicability: If bad statistics is prevalent in your field, does it follow you can’t be guilty of scientific fraud?

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Mayo
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fraudbusters

If questionable research practices (QRPs) are prevalent in your field, then apparently you can’t be guilty of scientific misconduct or fraud (by mere QRP finagling), or so some suggest. Isn’t that an incentive for making QRPs the norm? 

The following is a recent blog discussion (by  Ulrich Schimmack) on the Jens Förster scandal: I thank Richard Gill for alerting me. I haven’t fully analyzed Schimmack’s arguments, so please share your reactions. I agree with him on the importance of power analysis, but I’m not sure that the way he’s using it (via his “R index”) shows what he claims. Nor do I see how any of this invalidates, or spares Förster from, the fraud allegations along the lines of Simonsohn[i]. Most importantly, I don’t see that cheating one way vs another changes the scientific status of Forster’s flawed inference. Forster already admitted that faced with unfavorable results, he’d always find ways to fix things until he got results in sync with his theory (on the social psychology of creativity priming). Fraud by any other name.

Förster

Förster

The official report, “Suspicion of scientific misconduct by Dr. Jens Förster,” is anonymous and dated September 2012. An earlier post on this blog, “Who ya gonna call for statistical fraud busting” featured a discussion by Neuroskeptic that I found illuminating, from Discover Magazine: On the “Suspicion of Scientific Misconduct by Jens Förster.” Also see Retraction Watch.

Does anyone know the official status of the Forster case?

“How Power Analysis Could Have Prevented the Sad Story of Dr. Förster”

From Ulrich Schimmack’s “Replicability Index” blog January 2, 2015. A January 14, 2015 update is here. (occasional emphasis in bright red is mine) Continue reading →

Categories: junk science, reproducibility, Statistical fraudbusting, Statistical power, Statistics | Tags:

Winners of the December 2014 Palindrome Contest: TWO!

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Mayo

I am pleased to announce that there were two (returning) winners for the December Palindrome contest.
The requirement was: In addition to Elba, one word: Math

(or maths; mathematics, for anyone brave enough).

The winners in alphabetical order are:

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Karthik Durvasula
Visiting Assistant Professor in Phonology & Phonetics at Michigan State University

Palindrome: Ha! Am I at natal bash? tame lives, ol’ able-stats Elba. “Lose vile maths!” a blatant aim, aah!

(This was in honor of my birthday–thanks Karthik!)

Bio: I’m a Visiting Assistant Professor in Phonology & Phonetics at Michigan State University. My work primarily deals with probing people’s subconscious knowledge of (abstract) sound patterns. Recently, I have been working on auditory illusions that stem from the bias that such subconscious knowledge introduces. Continue reading →

Categories: Palindrome

“Only those samples which fit the model best in cross validation were included” (whistleblower) “I suspect that we likely disagree with what constitutes validation” (Potti and Nevins)

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Mayo
toilet-fireworks-by-stephenthruvegas-on-flickr

more Potti training/validation fireworks

So it turns out there was an internal whistleblower in the Potti scandal at Duke after all (despite denials by the Duke researchers involved ). It was a medical student Brad Perez. It’s in the Jan. 9, 2015 Cancer Letter*. Ever since my first post on Potti last May (part 1), I’ve received various e-mails and phone calls from people wishing to confide their inside scoops and first-hand experiences working with Potti (in a statistical capacity) but I was waiting for some published item. I believe there’s a court case still pending (anyone know?)

Now here we have a great example of something I am increasingly seeing: Challenges to the scientific credentials of data analysis are dismissed as mere differences in statistical philosophies or as understandable disagreements about stringency of data validation.[i] This is further enabled by conceptual fuzziness as to what counts as meaningful replication, validation, legitimate cross-validation.

If so, then statistical philosophy is of crucial practical importance.[ii]

Here’s the bulk of Perez’s memo (my emphasis in bold), followed by an even more remarkable reply from Potti and Nevins. Continue reading →

Categories: evidence-based policy, junk science, PhilStat/Med, Statistics | Tags:

On the Brittleness of Bayesian Inference–An Update: Owhadi and Scovel (guest post)

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Mayo

shattered-glass-portrait-1

owhadi

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Houman Owhadi

Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Control and Dynamical Systems,
Computing + Mathematical Sciences
California Institute of Technology, USA

 

Clintpic

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Clint Scovel
Senior Scientist,
Computing + Mathematical Sciences
California Institute of Technology, USA

 

 “On the Brittleness of Bayesian Inference: An Update”

Dear Readers,

This is an update on the results discussed in http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.6306 (“On the Brittleness of Bayesian Inference”) and a high level presentation of the more  recent paper “Qualitative Robustness in Bayesian Inference” available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.3984.

In http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6772 we looked at the robustness of Bayesian Inference in the classical framework of Bayesian Sensitivity Analysis. In that (classical) framework, the data is fixed, and one computes optimal bounds on (i.e. the sensitivity of) posterior values with respect to variations of the prior in a given class of priors. Now it is already well established that when the class of priors is finite-dimensional then one obtains robustness.  What we observe is that, under general conditions, when the class of priors is finite codimensional, then the optimal bounds on posterior are as large as possible, no matter the number of data points.

Our motivation for specifying a finite co-dimensional  class of priors is to look at what classical Bayesian sensitivity  analysis would conclude under finite  information and the best way to understand this notion of “brittleness under finite information”  is through the simple example already given in https://errorstatistics.com/2013/09/14/when-bayesian-inference-shatters-owhadi-scovel-and-sullivan-guest-post/ and recalled in Example 1. The mechanism causing this “brittleness” has its origin in the fact that, in classical Bayesian Sensitivity Analysis, optimal bounds on posterior values are computed after the observation of the specific value of the data, and that the probability of observing the data under some feasible prior may be arbitrarily small (see Example 2 for an illustration of this phenomenon). This data dependence of worst priors is inherent to this classical framework and the resulting brittleness under finite-information can be seen as an extreme occurrence of the dilation phenomenon (the fact that optimal bounds on prior values may become less precise after conditioning) observed in classical robust Bayesian inference [6]. Continue reading →

Categories: Bayesian/frequentist, Statistics

“When Bayesian Inference Shatters” Owhadi and Scovel (reblog)

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Mayo

images-9I’m about to post an update of this, most viewed, blogpost, so I reblog it here as a refresher. If interested, you might check the original discussion.

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I am grateful to Drs. Owhadi and Scovel for replying to my request for “a plain Jane” explication of their interesting paper, “When Bayesian Inference Shatters”, and especially for permission to post it. 

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owhadiHouman Owhadi
Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Control and Dynamical Systems, Computing + Mathematical Sciences,
California Institute of Technology, USA

 Clint Scovel
ClintpicSenior Scientist,
Computing + Mathematical Sciences,
California Institute of Technology, USA

“When Bayesian Inference Shatters: A plain Jane explanation”

This is an attempt at a “plain Jane” presentation of the results discussed in the recent arxiv paper “When Bayesian Inference Shatters” located at http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.6306 with the following abstract:

“With the advent of high-performance computing, Bayesian methods are increasingly popular tools for the quantification of uncertainty throughout science and industry. Since these methods impact the making of sometimes critical decisions in increasingly complicated contexts, the sensitivity of their posterior conclusions with respect to the underlying models and prior beliefs is becoming a pressing question. We report new results suggesting that, although Bayesian methods are robust when the number of possible outcomes is finite or when only a finite number of marginals of the data-generating distribution are unknown, they are generically brittle when applied to continuous systems with finite information on the data-generating distribution. This brittleness persists beyond the discretization of continuous systems and suggests that Bayesian inference is generically ill-posed in the sense of Hadamard when applied to such systems: if closeness is defined in terms of the total variation metric or the matching of a finite system of moments, then (1) two practitioners who use arbitrarily close models and observe the same (possibly arbitrarily large amount of) data may reach diametrically opposite conclusions; and (2) any given prior and model can be slightly perturbed to achieve any desired posterior conclusions.”

Now, it is already known from classical Robust Bayesian Inference that Bayesian Inference has some robustness if the random outcomes live in a finite space or if the class of priors considered is finite-dimensional (i.e. what you know is infinite and what you do not know is finite). What we have shown is that if the random outcomes live in an approximation of a continuous space (for instance, when they are decimal numbers given to finite precision) and your class of priors is finite co-dimensional (i.e. what you know is finite and what you do not know may be infinite) then, if the data is observed at a fine enough resolution, the range of posterior values is the deterministic range of the quantity of interest, irrespective of the size of the data. Continue reading →

Categories: 3-year memory lane, Bayesian/frequentist, Statistics

Significance Levels are Made a Whipping Boy on Climate Change Evidence: Is .05 Too Strict? (Schachtman on Oreskes)

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Mayo
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too strict/not strict enough

Given the daily thrashing significance tests receive because of how preposterously easy it is claimed to satisfy the .05 significance level requirement, it’s surprising[i] to hear Naomi Oreskes blaming the .05 standard as demanding too high a burden of proof for accepting climate change. “Playing Dumb on Climate Change,” N.Y. Times Sunday Rev. at 2 (Jan. 4, 2015). Is there anything for which significance levels do not serve as convenient whipping boys?  Thanks to lawyer Nathan Schachtman for alerting me to her opinion piece today (congratulations to Oreskes!),and to his current blogpost. I haven’t carefully read her article, but one claim jumped out: scientists, she says, “practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.” If only! *I add a few remarks at the end.  Anyhow here’s Schachtman’s post:

NAS-3

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“Playing Dumb on Statistical Significance”
by Nathan Schachtman

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science in Harvard University. Her writings on the history of geology are well respected; her writings on climate change tend to be more adversarial, rhetorical, and ad hominem. See, e.g., Naomi Oreskes,Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming(N.Y. 2010). Oreskes’ abuse of the meaning of significance probability for her own rhetorical ends is on display in today’s New York Times. Naomi Oreskes, “Playing Dumb on Climate Change,” N.Y. Times Sunday Rev. at 2 (Jan. 4, 2015).

Oreskes wants her readers to believe that those who are resisting her conclusions about climate change are hiding behind an unreasonably high burden of proof, which follows from the conventional standard of significance in significance probability. In presenting her argument, Oreskes consistently misrepresents the meaning of statistical significance and confidence intervals to be about the overall burden of proof for a scientific claim:

“Typically, scientists apply a 95 percent confidence limit, meaning that they will accept a causal claim only if they can show that the odds of the relationship’s occurring by chance are no more than one in 20. But it also means that if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim. It’s like not gambling in Las Vegas even though you had a nearly 95 percent chance of winning.”

Although the confidence interval is related to the pre-specified Type I error rate, alpha, and so a conventional alpha of 5% does lead to a coefficient of confidence of 95%, Oreskes has misstated the confidence interval to be a burden of proof consisting of a 95% posterior probability. The “relationship” is either true or not; the p-value or confidence interval provides a probability for the sample statistic, or one more extreme, on the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. The 95% probability of confidence intervals derives from the long-term frequency that 95% of all confidence intervals, based upon samples of the same size, will contain the true parameter of interest.

Oreskes is an historian, but her history of statistical significance appears equally ill considered. Here is how she describes the “severe” standard of the 95% confidence interval: Continue reading →

Categories: evidence-based policy, science communication, Statistics

No headache power (for Deirdre)

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Mayo
670px-Relieve-a-Tension-Headache-Step-6Bullet1

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Deirdre McCloskey’s comment leads me to try to give a “no headache” treatment of some key points about the power of a statistical test. (Trigger warning: formal stat people may dislike the informality of my exercise.)

We all know that for a given test, as the probability of a type 1 error goes down the probability of a type 2 error goes up (and power goes down).

And as the probability of a type 2 error goes down (and power goes up), the probability of a type 1 error goes up. Leaving everything else the same. There’s a trade-off between the two error probabilities.(No free lunch.) No headache powder called for.

So if someone said, as the power increases, the probability of a type 1 error decreases, they’d be saying: As the type 2 error decreases, the probability of a type 1 error decreases! That’s the opposite of a trade-off. So you’d know automatically they’d made a mistake or were defining things in a way that differs from standard NP statistical tests.

Before turning to my little exercise, I note that power is defined in terms of a test’s cut-off for rejecting the null, whereas a severity assessment always considers the actual value observed (attained power). Here I’m just trying to clarify regular old power, as defined in a N-P test.

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Let’s use a familiar oversimple example to fix the trade-off in our minds so that it cannot be dislodged. Our old friend, test T+ : We’re testing the mean of a Normal distribution with n iid samples, and (for simplicity) known, fixed σ:

H0: µ ≤  0 against H1: µ >  0

Let σ = 2, n = 25, so (σ/ √n) = .4. To avoid those annoying X-bars, I will use M for the sample mean. I will abbreviate (σ/ √n) as σx .

  • Test T+ is a rule: reject H0 iff M > m*
  • Power of a test T+ is computed in relation to values of µ >  0.
  • The power of T+ against alternative µ =µ1 = Pr(T+ rejects H0 ;µ = µ1) = Pr(M > m*; µ = µ1)

We may abbreviate this as : POW(T+,α, µ = µ1) Continue reading →

Categories: power, statistical tests, Statistics

Blog Contents: Oct.- Dec. 2014

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Mayo

metablog old fashion typewriterBLOG CONTENTS: OCT – DEC 2014*

OCTOBER 2014

  • 10/01 Oy Faye! What are the odds of not conflating simple conditional probability and likelihood with Bayesian success stories?
  • 10/05 Diederik Stapel hired to teach “social philosophy” because students got tired of success stories… or something (rejected post)
  • 10/07 A (Jan 14, 2014) interview with Sir David Cox by “Statistics Views”
  • 10/10 BREAKING THE (Royall) LAW! (of likelihood) (C)
  • 10/14 Gelman recognizes his error-statistical (Bayesian) foundations
  • 10/18 PhilStat/Law: Nathan Schachtman: Acknowledging Multiple Comparisons in Statistical Analysis: Courts Can and Must
  • 10/22 September 2014: Blog Contents
  • 10/25 3 YEARS AGO: MONTHLY MEMORY LANE
  • 10/26 To Quarantine or not to Quarantine?: Science & Policy in the time of Ebola
  • 10/31 Oxford Gaol: Statistical Bogeymen

NOVEMBER 2014

  • 11/01 Philosophy of Science Assoc. (PSA) symposium on Philosophy of Statistics in the Higgs Experiments “How Many Sigmas to Discovery?”
  • 11/09 “Statistical Flukes, the Higgs Discovery, and 5 Sigma” at the PSA
  • 11/11 The Amazing Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge
  • 11/12 A biased report of the probability of a statistical fluke: Is it cheating?
  • 11/15 Why the Law of Likelihood is bankrupt–as an account of evidence
  • 11/18 Lucien Le Cam: “The Bayesians Hold the Magic”
  • 11/20 Erich Lehmann: Statistician and Poet
  • 11/22 Msc Kvetch: “You are a Medical Statistic”, or “How Medical Care Is Being Corrupted”
  • 11/25 How likelihoodists exaggerate evidence from statistical tests
  • 11/30 3 YEARS AGO: MONTHLY (Nov.) MEMORY LANE

 

DECEMBER 2014

  • 12/02 My Rutgers Seminar: tomorrow, December 3, on philosophy of statistics
  • 12/04 “Probing with Severity: Beyond Bayesian Probabilism and Frequentist Performance” (Dec 3 Seminar slides)
  • 12/06 How power morcellators inadvertently spread uterine cancer
  • 12/11 Msc. Kvetch: What does it mean for a battle to be “lost by the media”?
  • 12/13 S. Stanley Young: Are there mortality co-benefits to the Clean Power Plan? It depends. (Guest Post)
  • 12/17 Announcing Kent Staley’s new book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (CUP)
  • 12/21 Derailment: Faking Science: A true story of academic fraud, by Diederik Stapel (translated into English)
  • 12/23 All I want for Chrismukkah is that critics & “reformers” quit howlers of testing (after 3 yrs of blogging)! So here’s Aris Spanos “Talking Back!”
  • 12/26 3 YEARS AGO: MONTHLY (Dec.) MEMORY LANE
  • 12/29 To raise the power of a test is to lower (not raise) the “hurdle” for rejecting the null (Ziliac and McCloskey 3 years on)
  • 12/31 Midnight With Birnbaum (Happy New Year)

* Compiled by Jean A. Miller

Categories: blog contents, Statistics

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