statistical tests

Stephen Senn: The pathetic P-value (Guest Post)

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Mayo
S. Senn

S. Senn

Stephen Senn
Head of Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS)
Luxembourg Institute of Health

The pathetic P-value

This is the way the story is now often told. RA Fisher is the villain. Scientists were virtuously treading the Bayesian path, when along came Fisher and gave them P-values, which they gladly accepted, because they could get ‘significance’ so much more easily. Nearly a century of corrupt science followed but now there are signs that there is a willingness to return to the path of virtue and having abandoned this horrible Fisherian complication:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started …

A condition of complete simplicity..

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well

TS Eliot, Little Gidding

Consider, for example, distinguished scientist David Colquhoun citing the excellent scientific journalist Robert Matthews as follows

“There is an element of truth in the conclusion of a perspicacious journalist:

‘The plain fact is that 70 years ago Ronald Fisher gave scientists a mathematical machine for turning baloney into breakthroughs, and flukes into funding. It is time to pull the plug. ‘

Robert Matthews Sunday Telegraph, 13 September 1998.” [1]

However, this is not a plain fact but just plain wrong. Even if P-values were the guilty ‘mathematical machine’ they are portrayed to be, it is not RA Fisher’s fault. Putting the historical record right helps one to understand the issues better. As I shall argue, at the heart of this is not a disagreement between Bayesian and frequentist approaches but between two Bayesian approaches: it is a conflict to do with the choice of prior distributions[2].

Fisher did not persuade scientists to calculate P-values rather than Bayesian posterior probabilities; he persuaded them that the probabilities that they were already calculating and interpreting as posterior probabilities relied for this interpretation on a doubtful assumption. He proposed to replace this interpretation with one that did not rely on the assumption. Continue reading →

Categories: P-values, S. Senn, statistical tests, Statistics | 148 Comments

What’s wrong with taking (1 – β)/α, as a likelihood ratio comparing H0 and H1?

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Mayo
mayo_thumbnail_rings

.

Here’s a quick note on something that I often find in discussions on tests, even though it treats “power”, which is a capacity-of-test notion, as if it were a fit-with-data notion…..

1. Take a one-sided Normal test T+: with n iid samples:

H0: µ ≤  0 against H1: µ >  0

σ = 10,  n = 100,  σ/√n =σx= 1,  α = .025.

So the test would reject H0 iff Z > c.025 =1.96. (1.96. is the “cut-off”.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  1. Simple rules for alternatives against which T+ has high power:
  • If we add σx (here 1) to the cut-off (here, 1.96) we are at an alternative value for µ that test T+ has .84 power to detect.
  • If we add 3σx to the cut-off we are at an alternative value for µ that test T+ has ~ .999 power to detect. This value, which we can write as µ.999 = 4.96

Let the observed outcome just reach the cut-off to reject the null,z0 = 1.96.

If we were to form a “likelihood ratio” of μ = 4.96 compared to μ0 = 0 using

[Power(T+, 4.96)]/α,

it would be 40.  (.999/.025).

It is absurd to say the alternative 4.96 is supported 40 times as much as the null, understanding support as likelihood or comparative likelihood. (The data 1.96 are even closer to 0 than to 4.96). The same point can be made with less extreme cases.) What is commonly done next is to assign priors of .5 to the two hypotheses, yielding

Pr(H0 |z0) = 1/ (1 + 40) = .024, so Pr(H1 |z0) = .976.

Such an inference is highly unwarranted and would almost always be wrong. Continue reading →

Categories: Bayesian/frequentist, law of likelihood, Statistical power, statistical tests, Statistics, Stephen Senn | 87 Comments

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

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Mayo
img_0737

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. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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: , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Some statistical dirty laundry

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

.

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.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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 | 27 Comments

No headache power (for Deirdre)

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

.

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.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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 | 6 Comments

A biased report of the probability of a statistical fluke: Is it cheating?

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Mayo

cropped-qqqq.jpg One year ago I reblogged a post from Matt Strassler, “Nature is Full of Surprises” (2011). In it he claims that

[Statistical debate] “often boils down to this: is the question that you have asked in applying your statistical method the most even-handed, the most open-minded, the most unbiased question that you could possibly ask?

It’s not asking whether someone made a mathematical mistake. It is asking whether they cheated — whether they adjusted the rules unfairly — and biased the answer through the question they chose…”

(Nov. 2014):I am impressed (i.e., struck by the fact) that he goes so far as to call it “cheating”. Anyway, here is the rest of the reblog from Strassler which bears on a number of recent discussions:


“…If there are 23 people in a room, the chance that two of them have the same birthday is 50 percent, while the chance that two of them were born on a particular day, say, January 1st, is quite low, a small fraction of a percent. The more you specify the coincidence, the rarer it is; the broader the range of coincidences at which you are ready to express surprise, the more likely it is that one will turn up. Continue reading →

Categories: Higgs, spurious p values, Statistics | 7 Comments

A. Spanos: Talking back to the critics using error statistics (Phil6334)

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Mayo

spanos 2014

Aris Spanos’ overview of error statistical responses to familiar criticisms of statistical tests. Related reading is Mayo and Spanos (2011)

Categories: Error Statistics, frequentist/Bayesian, Phil6334, reforming the reformers, statistical tests, Statistics | Leave a comment

Reliability and Reproducibility: Fraudulent p-values through multiple testing (and other biases): S. Stanley Young (Phil 6334: Day#13)

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Mayo

YoungPhoto2008

images-6S. Stanley Young, PhD
Assistant Director for Bioinformatics
National Institute of Statistical Sciences
Research Triangle Park, NC

Here are Dr. Stanley Young’s slides from our April 25 seminar. They contain several tips for unearthing deception by fraudulent p-value reports. Since it’s Saturday night, you might wish to perform an experiment with three 10-sided dice*,recording the results of 100 rolls (3 at a time) on the form on slide 13. An entry, e.g., (0,1,3) becomes an imaginary p-value of .013 associated with the type of tumor, male-female, old-young. You report only hypotheses whose null is rejected at a “p-value” less than .05. Forward your results to me for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

*Sets of 10-sided dice will be offered as a palindrome prize beginning in May.

Categories: Phil6334, science communication, spurious p values, Statistical fraudbusting, Statistics | Tags: | 12 Comments

capitalizing on chance (ii)

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Mayo
Mayo playing the slots

DGM playing the slots

I may have been exaggerating one year ago when I started this post with “Hardly a day goes by”, but now it is literally the case*. (This  also pertains to reading for Phil6334 for Thurs. March 6):

Hardly a day goes by where I do not come across an article on the problems for statistical inference based on fallaciously capitalizing on chance: high-powered computer searches and “big” data trolling offer rich hunting grounds out of which apparently impressive results may be “cherry-picked”:

When the hypotheses are tested on the same data that suggested them and when tests of significance are based on such data, then a spurious impression of validity may result. The computed level of significance may have almost no relation to the true level. . . . Suppose that twenty sets of differences have been examined, that one difference seems large enough to test and that this difference turns out to be “significant at the 5 percent level.” Does this mean that differences as large as the one tested would occur by chance only 5 percent of the time when the true difference is zero? The answer is no, because the difference tested has been selected from the twenty differences that were examined. The actual level of significance is not 5 percent, but 64 percent! (Selvin 1970, 104)[1]

…Oh wait -this is from a contributor to Morrison and Henkel way back in 1970! But there is one big contrast, I find, that makes current day reports so much more worrisome: critics of the Morrison and Henkel ilk clearly report that to ignore a variety of “selection effects” results in a fallacious computation of the actual significance level associated with a given inference; clear terminology is used to distinguish the “computed” or “nominal” significance level on the one hand, and the actual or warranted significance level on the other. Continue reading →

Categories: junk science, selection effects, spurious p values, Statistical fraudbusting, Statistics | 4 Comments

“The probability that it be a statistical fluke” [iia]

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Mayo

imagesMy rationale for the last post is really just to highlight such passages as:

“Particle physicists have agreed, by convention, not to view an observed phenomenon as a discovery until the probability that it be a statistical fluke be below 1 in a million, a requirement that seems insanely draconian at first glance.” (Strassler)….

Even before the dust had settled regarding the discovery of a Standard Model-like Higgs particle, the nature and rationale of the 5-sigma discovery criterion began to be challenged. But my interest now is not in the fact that the 5-sigma discovery criterion is a convention, nor with the choice of 5. It is the understanding of “the probability that it be a statistical fluke” that interests me, because if we can get this right, I think we can understand a kind of equivocation that leads many to suppose that significance tests are being misinterpreted—even when they aren’t! So given that I’m stuck, unmoving, on this bus outside of London for 2+ hours (because of a car accident)—and the internet works—I’ll try to scratch out my point (expect errors, we’re moving now). Here’s another passage…

“Even when the probability of a particular statistical fluke, of a particular type, in a particular experiment seems to be very small indeed, we must remain cautious. …Is it really unlikely that someone, somewhere, will hit the jackpot, and see in their data an amazing statistical fluke that seems so impossible that it convincingly appears to be a new phenomenon?”

A very sketchy nutshell of the Higgs statistics: There is a general model of the detector, and within that model researchers define a “global signal strength” parameter “such that H0: μ = 0 corresponds to the background only hypothesis and μ = 1 corresponds to the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson signal in addition to the background” (quote from an ATLAS report). The statistical test may be framed as a one-sided test; the test statistic records differences in the positive direction, in standard deviation or sigma units. The interest is not in the point against point hypotheses, but in finding discrepancies from H0 in the direction of the alternative, and then estimating their values.  The improbability of the 5-sigma excess alludes to the sampling Continue reading →

Categories: Error Statistics, P-values, statistical tests, Statistics | 66 Comments

Probability that it is a statistical fluke [i]

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Mayo

cropped-qqqq.jpgFrom another blog:
“…If there are 23 people in a room, the chance that two of them have the same birthday is 50 percent, while the chance that two of them were born on a particular day, say, January 1st, is quite low, a small fraction of a percent. The more you specify the coincidence, the rarer it is; the broader the range of coincidences at which you are ready to express surprise, the more likely it is that one will turn up.

Humans are notoriously incompetent at estimating these types of probabilities… which is why scientists (including particle physicists), when they see something unusual in their data, always try to quantify the probability that it is a statistical fluke — a pure chance event. You would not want to be wrong, and celebrate your future Nobel prize only to receive instead a booby prize. (And nature gives out lots and lots of booby prizes.) So scientists, grabbing their statistics textbooks and appealing to the latest advances in statistical techniques, compute these probabilities as best they can. Armed with these numbers, they then try to infer whether it is likely that they have actually discovered something new or not.

And on the whole, it doesn’t work. Unless the answer is so obvious that no statistical argument is needed, the numbers typically do not settle the question.

Despite this remark, you mustn’t think I am arguing against doing statistics. One has to do something better than guessing. But there is a reason for the old saw: “There are three types of falsehoods: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It’s not that statistics themselves lie, but that to some extent, unless the case is virtually airtight, you can almost always choose to ask a question in such a way as to get any answer you want. … [For instance, in 1991 the volcano Pinatubo in the Philippines had its titanic eruption while a hurricane (or `typhoon’ as it is called in that region) happened to be underway. Oh, and the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept 15, 2008 was followed within three days by the breakdown of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during its first week of running… Coincidence?  I-think-so.] One can draw completely different conclusions, both of them statistically sensible, by looking at the same data from two different points of view, and asking for the statistical answer to two different questions.

To a certain extent, this is just why Republicans and Democrats almost never agree, even if they are discussing the same basic data. The point of a spin-doctor is to figure out which question to ask in order to get the political answer that you wanted in advance. Obviously this kind of manipulation is unacceptable in science. Unfortunately it is also unavoidable. Continue reading →

Categories: Error Statistics, Severity vs Posterior Probabilities, spurious p values | 22 Comments

Bad statistics: crime or free speech (II)? Harkonen update: Phil Stat / Law /Stock

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Mayo

photo-on-12-17-12-at-3-43-pm-e1355777379998There’s an update (with overview) on the infamous Harkonen case in Nature with the dubious title “Uncertainty on Trial“, first discussed in my (11/13/12) post “Bad statistics: Crime or Free speech”, and continued here. The new Nature article quotes from Steven Goodman:

“You don’t want to have on the books a conviction for a practice that many scientists do, and in fact think is critical to medical research,” says Steven Goodman, an epidemiologist at Stanford University in California who has filed a brief in support of Harkonen……

Goodman, who was paid by Harkonen to consult on the case, contends that the government’s case is based on faulty reasoning, incorrectly equating an arbitrary threshold of statistical significance with truth. “How high does probability have to be before you’re thrown in jail?” he asks. “This would be a lot like throwing weathermen in jail if they predicted a 40% chance of rain, and it rained.”

I don’t think the case at hand is akin to the exploratory research that Goodman likely has in mind, and the rain analogy seems very far-fetched. (There’s much more to the context, but the links should suffice.) Lawyer Nathan Schachtmen also has an update on his blog today. He and I usually concur, but we largely disagree on this one[i]. I see no new information that would lead me to shift my earlier arguments on the evidential issues. From a Dec. 17, 2012 post on Schachtman (“multiplicity and duplicity”):

So what’s the allegation that the prosecutors are being duplicitous about statistical evidence in the case discussed in my two previous (‘Bad Statistics’) posts? As a non-lawyer, I will ponder only the evidential (and not the criminal) issues involved.

“After the conviction, Dr. Harkonen’s counsel moved for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered evidence. Dr. Harkonen’s counsel hoisted the prosecutors with their own petards, by quoting the government’s amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court in Matrixx Initiatives Inc. v. Siracusano, 131 S. Ct. 1309 (2011).  In Matrixx, the securities fraud plaintiffs contended that they need not plead ‘statistically significant’ evidence for adverse drug effects.” (Schachtman’s part 2, ‘The Duplicity Problem – The Matrixx Motion’) 

The Matrixx case is another philstat/law/stock example taken up in this blog here, here, and here.  Why are the Harkonen prosecutors “hoisted with their own petards” (a great expression, by the way)? Continue reading →

Categories: PhilStatLaw, PhilStock, statistical tests, Statistics | Tags: | 23 Comments

Phil/Stat/Law: 50 Shades of gray between error and fraud

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Mayo

500x307-embo-reports-vol-73-meeting-report-fig-1-abcAn update on the Diederik Stapel case: July 2, 2013, The Scientist, “Dutch Fraudster Scientist Avoids Jail”.

Two years after being exposed by colleagues for making up data in at least 30 published journal articles, former Tilburg University professor Diederik Stapel will avoid a trial for fraud. Once one of the Netherlands’ leading social psychologists, Stapel has agreed to a pre-trial settlement with Dutch prosecutors to perform 120 hours of community service.

According to Dutch newspaper NRC Handeslblad, the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research awarded Stapel $2.8 million in grants for research that was ultimately tarnished by misconduct. However, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service said on Friday (June 28) that because Stapel used the grant money for student and staff salaries to perform research, he had not misused public funds. …

In addition to the community service he will perform, Stapel has agreed not to make a claim on 18 months’ worth of illness and disability compensation that he was due under his terms of employment with Tilburg University. Stapel also voluntarily returned his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam and, according to Retraction Watch, retracted 53 of the more than 150 papers he has co-authored.

“I very much regret the mistakes I have made,” Stapel told ScienceInsider. “I am happy for my colleagues as well as for my family that with this settlement, a court case has been avoided.”

No surprise he’s not doing jail time, but 120 hours of community service?  After over a decade of fraud, and tainting 14 of 21 of the PhD theses he supervised?  Perhaps the “community service” should be to actually run the experiments he had designed?  What about his innocence of misusing public funds? Continue reading →

Categories: PhilStatLaw, spurious p values, Statistics | 13 Comments

Some statistical dirty laundry

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Mayo

Objectivity 1: Will the Real Junk Science Please Stand Up?I finally had a chance to fully read the 2012 Tilberg Report* on “Flawed Science” last night. The full report is now here. 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:

In the training program for PhD students, the relevant basic principles of philosophy of science, methodology, ethics and statistics that enable the responsible practice of science must be covered. Based on these insights, research Master’s students and PhD students must receive practical training from their supervisors in the application of the rules governing proper and honest scientific research, which should include examples of such undesirable conduct as data massage. The Graduate School must explicitly ensure that this is implemented.

A philosophy department could well create an entire core specialization that revolved around “the relevant basic principles of philosophy of science, methodology, ethics and statistics that enable the responsible practice of science” (ideally linked with one or more other departments).  That would be both innovative and fill an important gap, it seems to me. Is anyone doing this?

3. Hanging out some statistical dirty laundry.images
Items in their laundry list include:

  • An experiment fails to yield the expected statistically significant results. The experiment is repeated, often with minor changes in the manipulation or other conditions, and the only experiment subsequently reported is the one that did yield the expected results. The article makes no mention of this exploratory method… It should be clear, certainly with the usually modest numbers of experimental subjects, that using experiments in this way can easily lead to an accumulation of chance findings…. Continue reading →
Categories: junk science, spurious p values, Statistics | 6 Comments

Higgs analysis and statistical flukes (part 2)

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Mayo

imagesEveryone was excited when the Higgs boson results were reported on July 4, 2012 indicating evidence for a Higgs-like particle based on a “5 sigma observed effect”. The observed effect refers to the number of excess events of a given type that are “observed” in comparison to the number (or proportion) that would be expected from background alone, and not due to a Higgs particle. This continues my earlier post. This, too, is a rough outsider’s angle on one small aspect of the statistical inferences involved. (Doubtless there will be corrections.) But that, apart from being fascinated by it, is precisely why I have chosen to discuss it: we should be able to employ a general philosophy of inference to get an understanding of what is true about the controversial concepts we purport to illuminate, e.g., significance levels.

Following an official report from ATLAS, researchers define a “global signal strength” parameter “such that μ = 0 corresponds to the background only hypothesis and μ = 1 corresponds to the SM Higgs boson signal in addition to the background” (where SM is the Standard Model). The statistical test may be framed as a one-sided test, where the test statistic (which is actually a ratio) records differences in the positive direction, in standard deviation (sigma) units. Reports such as: Continue reading →

Categories: P-values, statistical tests, Statistics | 33 Comments

Saturday Night Brainstorming and Task Forces: (2013) TFSI on NHST

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Mayo

img_0737Saturday Night Brainstorming: The TFSI on NHST–reblogging with a 2013 update. Please see most recent 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 the APA publication manual to adopt, and strategize about how to institutionalize improvements to statistical methodology. 

While frustrated that the TFSI has still not banned null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), since attempts going back to at least 1996, the 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?  

This year there are a couple of new members who are pitching in to contribute what they hope are novel ideas for reforming statistical practice. Since it’s Saturday night, let’s listen in on part of an (imaginary) brainstorming session of the New Reformers. This is a 2013 update of an earlier blogpost. Continue reading →

Categories: Comedy, reformers, statistical tests, Statistics | Tags: , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Severity Calculator

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Mayo

Severitiy excel program pic

SEV calculator (with comparisons to p-values, power, CIs)

In the illustration in the Jan. 2 post,

H0: μ < 0 vs H1: μ > 0

and the standard deviation SD = 1, n = 25, so σx  = SD/√n = .2
Setting α to .025, the cut-off for rejection is .39.  (can round to .4).

Let the observed mean X  = .2 , a statistically insignificant result (p value = .16)
SEV (μ < .2) = .5
SEV(μ <.3) = .7
SEV(μ <.4) = .84
SEV(μ <.5) = .93
SEV(μ <.6*) = .975
*rounding

Some students asked about crunching some of the numbers, so here’s a rather rickety old SEV calculator*. It is limited, rather scruffy-looking (nothing like the pretty visuals others post) but it is very useful. It also shows the Normal curves, how shaded areas change with changed hypothetical alternatives, and gives contrasts with confidence intervals. Continue reading →

Categories: Severity, statistical tests | Leave a comment

“Bad statistics”: crime or free speech?

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Mayo

wavy-capital3Hunting for “nominally” significant differences, trying different subgroups and multiple endpoints, can result in a much higher probability of erroneously inferring evidence of a risk or benefit than the nominal p-value, even in randomized controlled trials. This was an issue that arose in looking at RCTs in development economics (an area introduced to me by Nancy Cartwright), as at our symposium at the Philosophy of Science Association last month[i][ii]. Reporting the results of hunting and dredging in just the same way as if the relevant claims were predesignated can lead to misleading reports of actual significance levels.[iii]

Still, even if reporting spurious statistical results is considered “bad statistics,” is it criminal behavior? I noticed this issue in Nathan Schachtman’s blog over the past couple of days. The case concerns a biotech company, InterMune, and its previous CEO, Dr. Harkonen. Here’s an excerpt from Schachtman’s discussion (part 1). Continue reading →

Categories: PhilStatLaw, significance tests, spurious p values, Statistics | 27 Comments

Type 1 and 2 errors: Frankenstorm

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Mayo

I escaped (to Virginia) from New York just in the nick of time before the threat of Hurricane Sandy led Bloomberg to completely shut things down (a whole day in advance!) in expectation of the looming “Frankenstorm”. Searching for the latest update on the extent of Sandy’s impacts, I noticed an interesting post on statblogs  by Dr. Nic: “Which type of error do you prefer?”. She begins:

Mayor Bloomberg is avoiding a Type 2 error

As I write this, Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on the east coast of the United States. Mayor Bloomberg has ordered evacuations from various parts of New York City. All over the region people are stocking up on food and other essentials and waiting for Sandy to arrive. And if Sandy doesn’t turn out to be the worst storm ever, will people be relieved or disappointed? Either way there is a lot of money involved. And more importantly, risk of human injury and death. Will the forecasters be blamed for over-predicting?

Given that my son’s ability to travel back here is on-hold until planes fly again—not to mention that snow is beginning to swirl outside my window,—I definitely hope Bloomberg was erring on the side of caution. However, I think that type 1 and 2 errors should generally be put in terms of the extent and/or direction of errors that are or are not indicated or ruled out by test data.  Criticisms of tests very often harp on the dichotomous type 1 and 2 errors, as if a user of tests does not have latitude to infer the extent of discrepancies that are/are not likely. At times, attacks on the “culture of dichotomy” reach fever pitch, and lead some to call for the overthrow of tests altogether (often in favor of confidence intervals), as well as to the creation of task forces seeking to reform if not “ban” statistical tests (which I spoof here).
 Continue reading →

Categories: statistical tests, Statistics | 1 Comment

Blog at WordPress.com.