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Forking Paths Problem
The garden of forking paths is a problem in frequentist hypothesis testing through which researchers can unintentionally produce false positives for a tested hypothesis, through leaving themselves too many degrees of freedom. In contrast to fishing expeditions such as data dredging where only expected or apparently-significant results are published, this allows for a similar effect even when only one experiment is run, through a series of choices about how to implement methods and analyses, which are themselves informed by the data as it is observed and processed. History Exploring a forking decision-tree while analyzing data was at one point grouped with the multiple comparisons problem as an example of poor statistical method. However Gelman and Loken demonstrated that this can happen implicitly by researchers aware of best practices who only make a single comparison and only evaluate their data once. The fallacy is believing an analysis to be free of multiple comparisons de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Dredging
Data dredging, also known as data snooping or ''p''-hacking is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives. This is done by performing many statistical tests on the data and only reporting those that come back with significant results. Thus data dredging is also often a misused or misapplied form of data mining. The process of data dredging involves testing multiple hypotheses using a single data set by exhaustively searching—perhaps for combinations of variables that might show a correlation, and perhaps for groups of cases or observations that show differences in their mean or in their breakdown by some other variable. Conventional tests of statistical significance are based on the probability that a particular result would arise if chance alone were at work, and necessarily accept some risk of mistaken conclusions of a certain type (mistak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multiple Comparisons Problem
Multiple comparisons, multiplicity or multiple testing problem occurs in statistics when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously or estimates a subset of parameters selected based on the observed values. The larger the number of inferences made, the more likely erroneous inferences become. Several statistical techniques have been developed to address this problem, for example, by requiring a stricter significance threshold for individual comparisons, so as to compensate for the number of inferences being made. Methods for family-wise error rate give the probability of false positives resulting from the multiple comparisons problem. History The problem of multiple comparisons received increased attention in the 1950s with the work of statisticians such as Tukey and Scheffé. Over the ensuing decades, many procedures were developed to address the problem. In 1996, the first international conference on multiple comparison procedures took place in Tel Aviv. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multiverse Analysis
Multiverse analysis is a scientific method that specifies and then runs a set of plausible alternative models or statistical tests for a single hypothesis. It is a method to address the issue that the "scientific process confronts researchers with a multiplicity of seemingly minor, yet nontrivial, decision points, each of which may introduce variability in research outcomes". A problem also known as Researcher degrees of freedom or as the garden of forking paths. It is a method arising in response to the credibility and replication crisis taking place in science, because it can diagnose the fragility or robustness of a study's findings. Multiverse analyses have been used in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. It is also a form of meta-analysis allowing researchers to provide evidence on how different model specifications impact results for the same hypothesis, and thus can point scientists toward where they might need better theory or causal models. Details Multiverse ana ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perspectives On Psychological Science
''Perspectives on Psychological Science'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of psychology. The journal was established in 2006 and the founding editor was Ed Diener (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). It is currently published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the Association for Psychological Science. Its last editor-in-chief Klaus Fiedler (University of Heidelberg) resigned on December 6, 2022, after a vote of no confidence by the Board of the Association for Psychological Science. As of December 1, 2024, its editor-in-chief is Arturo E. Hernandez. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Abstracting and indexing The journal is abstracted and indexed in: According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2021 impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact factor values are considered more prestigious or impo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Hypothesis Testing
A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data provide sufficient evidence to reject a particular hypothesis. A statistical hypothesis test typically involves a calculation of a test statistic. Then a decision is made, either by comparing the test statistic to a Critical value (statistics), critical value or equivalently by evaluating a p-value, ''p''-value computed from the test statistic. Roughly 100 list of statistical tests, specialized statistical tests are in use and noteworthy. History While hypothesis testing was popularized early in the 20th century, early forms were used in the 1700s. The first use is credited to John Arbuthnot (1710), followed by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1770s), in analyzing the human sex ratio at birth; see . Choice of null hypothesis Paul Meehl has argued that the epistemological importance of the choice of null hypothesis has gone largely unacknowledged. When the null hypothesis is predicted by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Researcher Degrees Of Freedom
Researcher degrees of freedom is a concept referring to the inherent flexibility involved in the process of designing and conducting a scientific experiment, and in analyzing its results. The term reflects the fact that researchers can choose between multiple ways of collecting and analyzing data, and these decisions can be made either arbitrarily or because they, unlike other possible choices, produce a positive and statistically significant result. The researcher degrees of freedom has positives such as affording the ability to look at nature from different angles, allowing new discoveries and hypotheses to be generated. However, researcher degrees of freedom can lead to data dredging and other questionable research practices where the different interpretations and analyses are taken for granted Their widespread use represents an inherent methodological limitation in scientific research, and contributes to an inflated rate of false-positive findings. They can also lead to ove ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fallacies
A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument that may appear to be well-reasoned if unnoticed. The term was introduced in the Western intellectual tradition by the Aristotelian '' De Sophisticis Elenchis''. Fallacies may be committed intentionally to manipulate or persuade by deception, unintentionally because of human limitations such as carelessness, cognitive or social biases and ignorance, or potentially due to the limitations of language and understanding of language. These delineations include not only the ignorance of the right reasoning standard but also the ignorance of relevant properties of the context. For instance, the soundness of legal arguments depends on the context in which they are made. Fallacies are commonly divided into "formal" and "informal". A formal fallacy is a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument that renders the argument invalid, while an informal fallacy originates in an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
