It’s time to talk about ditching statistical significance
2019; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 567; Issue: 7748 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1038/d41586-019-00874-8
ISSN1476-4687
Tópico(s)Winter Sports Injuries and Performance
ResumoFans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy know that the answer to life, the Universe and everything is 42.The joke, of course, is that truth cannot be revealed by a single number.And yet this is the job often assigned to P values: a measure of how surprising a result is, given assumptions about an experiment, including that no effect exists.Whether a P value falls above or below an arbitrary threshold demarcating 'statistical significance' (such as 0.05) decides whether hypotheses are accepted, papers are published and products are brought to market.But using P values as the sole arbiter of what to accept as truth can also mean that some analyses are biased, some false positives are overhyped and some genuine effects are overlooked.Change is in the air.In a Comment on page 305, three statisticians call for scientists to abandon statistical significance.The authors do not call for P values themselves to be ditched as a statistical tool -rather, they want an end to their use as an arbitrary threshold of significance.More than 800 researchers have added their names as signatories.A series of related articles is being published by the American Statistical Association this week (R.L. Wasserstein et al.Am.Stat.
Referência(s)