Statistics review 3: Hypothesis testing and P values

Overemphasis on hypothesis testing-and the use of P values to dichotomise significant or non-significant results-has detracted from more useful approaches to interpreting study results, such as estimation and confidence intervals. In medical studies…

Hypothesis testing, while by far the most common statistical technique for generating conclusions from data, is nonetheless not very informative. It emphasizes a banal and confusing question (Is it true that some set of population means are not all…

OBJECTIVES AND BACKGROUND: When testing a hypothesis statistically, a principle is generally accepted that exact p values shall be stated in the treatise. Researchers have the choice of many statistical computer programmes with implemented…

Learning about statistics is a lot like learning about science: the learning is more meaningful if you can actively explore. This second installment of Explorations in Statistics delves into test statistics and P values, two concepts fundamental to…

Often, biogeography is applied only as a narrative addition to phylogenetic studies and lacks scientific rigour. However, if research questions are framed as hypotheses, biogeographical scenarios become testable. In this review, we explain some…

The problem of testing a point null hypothesis (or a "small interval" null hypothesis) is considered. Of interest is the relationship between the P value (or observed significance level) and conditional and Bayesian measures of evidence against the…

The goal of this column is to help working clinicians understand p-values and the machinery of hypothesis testing underlying them, using a fictional study of an anti-insomnia drug. The author discusses what p-values really mean and common…

This paper generalizes the notion of p-value to obtain a system for assessing evidence in favor of an hypothesis. It is not quite a quantification in that evidence is a pair of numbers (the p-value and the p-value with null and alternative…

Overemphasis on hypothesis testing-and the use of P values to dichotomise significant or non-significant results-has detracted from more useful approaches to interpreting study results, such as estimation and confidence intervals. In medical studies…

Background: Given an observed test statistic and its degrees of freedom, one may compute the observed P value with most statistical packages. It is unknown to what extent test statistics and P values are congruent in published medical papers.…