Monthly Archives: November 2019

P-Value Statements and Their Unintended(?) Consequences: The June 2019 ASA President’s Corner (b)

Posted on November 30, 2019 by Mayo
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Mayo writing to Kafadar

I never met Karen Kafadar, the 2019 President of the American Statistical Association (ASA), but the other day I wrote to her in response to a call in her extremely interesting June 2019 President’s Corner: “Statistics and Unintended Consequences“:

  • “I welcome your suggestions for how we can communicate the importance of statistical inference and the proper interpretation of p-values to our scientific partners and science journal editors in a way they will understand and appreciate and can use with confidence and comfort—before they change their policies and abandon statistics altogether.”

I only recently came across her call, and I will share my letter below. First, here are some excerpts from her June President’s Corner (her December report is due any day). Continue reading →

Categories: ASA Guide to P-values, Bayesian/frequentist, P-values

A. Saltelli (Guest post): What can we learn from the debate on statistical significance?

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Mayo

Professor Andrea Saltelli
Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT), University of Bergen (UIB, Norway),
&
Open Evidence Research, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Barcelona

What can we learn from the debate on statistical significance?

The statistical community is in the midst of crisis whose latest convulsion is a petition to abolish the concept of significance. The problem is perhaps neither with significance, nor with statistics, but with the inconsiderate way we use numbers, and with our present approach to quantification.  Unless the crisis is resolved, there will be a loss of consensus in scientific arguments, with a corresponding decline of public trust in the findings of science. Continue reading →

Categories: Error Statistics

The ASA’s P-value Project: Why it’s Doing More Harm than Good (cont from 11/4/19)

Posted on November 14, 2019 by Mayo

 

cure by committee

Everything is impeach and remove these days! Should that hold also for the concept of statistical significance and P-value thresholds? There’s an active campaign that says yes, but I aver it is doing more harm than good. In my last post, I said I would count the ways it is detrimental until I became “too disconsolate to continue”. There I showed why the new movement, launched by Executive Director of the ASA (American Statistical Association), Ronald Wasserstein (in what I dub ASA II(note)), is self-defeating: it instantiates and encourages the human-all-too-human tendency to exploit researcher flexibility, rewards, and openings for bias in research (F, R & B Hypothesis). That was reason #1. Just reviewing it already fills me with such dismay, that I fear I will become too disconsolate to continue before even getting to reason #2. So let me just quickly jot down reasons #2, 3, 4, and 5 (without full arguments) before I expire. Continue reading →

Categories: ASA Guide to P-values

On Some Self-Defeating Aspects of the ASA’s (2019) Recommendations on Statistical Significance Tests (ii)

Posted on November 4, 2019 by Mayo

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“Before we stood on the edge of the precipice, now we have taken a great step forward”

 

What’s self-defeating about pursuing statistical reforms in the manner taken by the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 2019? In case you’re not up on the latest in significance testing wars, the 2016 ASA Statement on P-Values and Statistical Significance, ASA I, arguably, was a reasonably consensual statement on the need to avoid some well-known abuses of P-values–notably if you compute P-values, ignoring selective reporting, multiple testing, or stopping when the data look good, the computed P-value will be invalid. (Principle 4, ASA I) But then Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the ASA, and co-editors, decided they weren’t happy with their own 2016 statement because it “stopped just short of recommending that declarations of ‘statistical significance’ be abandoned” altogether. In their new statement–ASA II(note)–they announced: “We take that step here….Statistically significant –don’t say it and don’t use it”.

Why do I say it is a mis-take to have taken the supposed next “great step forward”? Why do I count it as unsuccessful as a piece of statistical science policy? In what ways does it make the situation worse? Let me count the ways. The first is in this post. Others will come in following posts, until I become too disconsolate to continue.[i] Continue reading →

Categories: P-values, stat wars and their casualties, statistical significance tests

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