statistics
The perils of data mining in science
An eye-opening science-related COVID roundup
Why COVID-19 rates are difficult to compute
Fake stats debunker Ioannidis on COVID-19 stats: Not reliable
Michael Egnor: The bird does NOT do math
Rob Sheldon on why statisticians are in a panic
Simpson’s Paradox: Numbers are stranger than we think
Proven: If you torture a Big Data enough, it will confess to anything
Media are flabby from a diet of junk science
Should we believe them when they tell us that the drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers our risk of death people with spouses live longer? A statistician and a physician team up to explain why not: A subtler manifestation of dishonesty in research is what amounts to statistical cheating. Here is how it works… If you try to answer one question – by asking about levels of coffee consumption, for example, to test whether drinking certain amounts a day are associated with more or less cancer; or whether being married is associated with increased longevity — and test the results with appropriate statistical methods, there is a 5% chance of getting a (nominally) statistically significant result purely by chance Read More ›
Requests for actual statistics FRAUD not unusual, science writer finds
There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud. The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390. Then, they constructed a table (shown below) that ranks requests by level of inappropriateness. For instance, at the very top is “falsify the statistical significance to support a desired result,” which is outright fraud. At the bottom is “do not show plot because it did not show as Read More ›