Tuesday, August 8, 2017

The scourge of p-values

Statistician Andrew Gelman posts this excerpt from a recent paper in JAMA, one of the top medical journals:
Nineteen of 203 patients treated with statins and 10 of 217 patients treated with placebo met the study definition of myalgia (9.4% vs 4.6%. P = .054). This finding did not reach statistical sig­nificance, but it indicates a 94.6% prob­ability that statins were responsible for the symptoms.
This is statistical nonsense, and shows that the JAMA editors do not understand p-values. A comment responds:
does anyone have a good, brief, layperson-accessible reference on correct (or at least skillful) interpretation of p-values?

No, this doesn’t exist and probably cannot exist at this point. So many misunderstandings need to be unraveled (and each person probably needs a personalized explanations) that it will take much longer.
Gelman regularly attacks misuse of p-values, but even he got caught explaining them wrong.

The situation appears hopeless. The p-value mess hit the fan 5 or 10 years ago when John Ioannidis showed that most published research is wrong, Daryl Bem showed that standard p-value experiments show that ppl have psychic powers, and studies showed that most medical and psychological research fails to replicate.

In spite of all this, p-values are used as much as ever, and our top journal editors continue to misunderstand them. Our top statisticians cannot even point to a good layman's tutorial.

2 comments:

  1. Are you suggesting that p-values are bad because Bem's experiments showed that people may have psychic ability? Bem apparently does believe that people do indeed have psychic ability.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Our top statisticians cannot even point to a good layman's tutorial."

    EXACTLY! The books don't explain it!

    ReplyDelete