Calibration of ρ Values for Testing Precise Null Hypotheses
One article on PainSci cites Sellke 2001: Statistical Significance Abuse
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
P values are the most commonly used tool to measure evidence against a hypothesis or hypothesized model. Unfortunately, they are often incorrectly viewed as an error probability for rejection of the hypothesis or, even worse, as the posterior probability that the hypothesis is true. The fact that these interpretations can be completely misleading when testing precise hypotheses is first reviewed, through consideration of two revealing simulations. Then two calibrations of a ρ value are developed, the first being interpretable as odds and the second as either a (conditional) frequentist error probability or as the posterior probability of the hypothesis.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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