On the hazards of significance testing. Part 2: the false discovery rate, or how not to make a fool of yourself with P values
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What follows is a simplified version of part of a paper that has now appeared as a preprint on arXiv. If you find anything wrong, or obscure, please email me. Be vicious: it will improve the eventual paper.
The paper has now appeared in the new Royal Society Open Science journal. There is a comments section at the end of the paper, for discussion. The first comment is from me, a correction of a typo that was spotted within hours. Luckily it’s pretty obvious.
It’s a follow-up to my very first paper, which was written in 1959 – 60, while I was a fourth year undergraduate (the history is at a recent blog). I hope this one is better.
‘". . . before anything was known of Lydgate’s skill, the judgements on it had naturally been divided, depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the stomach, or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence" ‘George Eliot (Middlemarch, Chap. 45)
"The standard approach in teaching, of stressing the formal definition of a p-value while warning against its misinterpretation, has simply been an abysmal failure” Sellke et al. (2001) `The American Statistician’ (55), 62–71
The last post was about screening. It showed that most screening tests are useless, in the sense that a large proportion of people who test positive do not have the condition. This propo...
Source: DC's goodscience - Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: false discovery rate statistics Bayesian P values significance Source Type: blogs
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