When a p value that fails to reach a threshold is reported, investigators sometimes imply there is a “trend towards statistical significance”. This interpretation expresses the view that if more subjects had been tested, the p value would have become more significant. Epidemiologists Wood and colleagues examined the probability of how the p value of a treatment effect changes when
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In our previous post, we revisited the Ioannidis argument on Why most published research findings are false. Other factors such as p-hacking can also increase the chance of reporting a false-positive result. Such results are associated with a p-value deemed to be statistically significant, but the underlying hypothesis is in fact false. Researcher degrees of freedom As scientists, we have
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It has been more than a decade that Ioannidis published his paper entiled Why most published research findings are false. Forstmeier et al. (2016) recently revisited the Ioannidis argument, and I thought it worthwhile to prepare a blog post on the topic to cement my understanding. Looking for a novel effect Let’s consider 1000 hypotheses we might want to test.
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