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Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

stats.org

1–10 of 15 posts

Re: Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

#2
The dangers of fishing for p values (to focus on those paragraphs) are covered pretty extensively in undergraduate courses in, at the very least, economics and political science. Something happens between that point, and the point at which a researcher is trying to publish in a journal. I think it is fairly obvious that the problem is related to competition for funding and advancement. Of course this is probably a much more difficult problem to solve.

Re: Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

#4
post #2

The dangers of fishing for p values (to focus on those paragraphs) are covered pretty extensively in undergraduate courses in, at the very least, economics and political science. Something happens between that point, and the point at which a researcher is trying to publish in a journal. I think it is fairly obvious that the problem is related to competition for funding and advancement. Of course this is probably a mu…

Nailed it.

I appreciate Prof. Van Der Laan's call for "quality" improvements, but as you point out, the incentives for "glory" trump "quality."

Re: Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

#6
post #2

The dangers of fishing for p values (to focus on those paragraphs) are covered pretty extensively in undergraduate courses in, at the very least, economics and political science. Something happens between that point, and the point at which a researcher is trying to publish in a journal. I think it is fairly obvious that the problem is related to competition for funding and advancement. Of course this is probably a mu…

There's another potential source of the problem: the time gap in between those undergraduate lessons are learned in the abstract and the later point in time when the exercise if those lessons is required. Unexercised knowledge atrophies like any other muscle.

Perhaps rather than placing so much emphasis on memorization recall exams, undergraduate evaluation should be based on exercising the research and peer review process. The best way to learn research is to do research.

Re: Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

#7
I always found the initial assumption that things are normally distributed quite odd.

For example if you work with latencies then the normal distribution is a terrible thing to use. The closer to zero you get the more skewed it has to be, simply because everything that can influence the result will mostly change it in one direction.

So in that particular case an Erlang distribution might be more applicable. And even that often falls short if you have periodic things (background tasks) occasionally messing with your latency, creating a multi-modal distribution.

Re: Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

#9
Odd editorial. It goes from a not-terribly-good explanation of some criticisms of null-hypothesis significance-testing to an advertorial for his lab's particular variant on ensembles. Or am I missing something important here?

Re: Why We Need a Statistical Revolution

#10
first thing we need is increased literacy in statistics.

if people actually understood they need to question the validity of statistics presented to them before making conclusions and based on those possibly faulty statistics, we'd be much better off.

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