Confidence intervals should be used in reporting trials

Why Confidence Intervals Should be Used in Reporting Studies of Complete Populations

Public-health reports sometimes leave out confidence intervals when data are presented for an entire population. A rationale cited for this practice is that population statistics are measurements rather than estimates; hence there is no need to consider random error because the statistics show exactly what occurred. We argue that this reason does not justify leaving out interval estimates. Targ...

Confidence Intervals in Analysis and Reporting of Clinical Trials

Regulatory agencies around the world have recommended reporting confidence intervals for treatment differences along with the results of significance tests. SAS provides easy and convenient ways to produce confidence intervals using procedures such as PROC GLM and PROC UNIVARIATE in conjunction with ODS (output delivery system). In this paper, I will discuss the relationship between significanc...

Confidence Intervals On Subsets May Be Misleading

How Many Times Should a Stochastic Model Be Run? An Approach Based on Confidence Intervals

A persistent problem in computational cognitive modeling is that many models are stochastic. If a model is stochastic, what is the prediction made by the model? In general, this problem is solved via Monte Carlo simulation. This raises the question of how many runs of the model are adequate to produce a meaningful prediction, a question that has received surprisingly little attention from the c...

Should levodopa be used anymore?

Levodopa is the most potent dopaminergic oral drug available in clinical practice. After chronic treatment, many patients with Parkinson's disease develop dyskinesia and motor fluctuations which are difficult to manage. It was hoped that introduction of dopaminergic agonists could diminish these side effects while keeping the same efficacy as levodopa. Prospective clinical data do not support t...