Specification Curve: Descriptive and Inferential Statistics on All Reasonable Specifications

Chapter 14 . Inferential Statistics , Descriptive Statistics and The Analysis Plan

Provided that the data show that a compound is safe, it is the primary efficacy analysis that determines whether the compound is approved. The secondary analyses support, clarify and confirm, but only one prospectively planned efficacy analysis can be primary in support of an effectiveness claim for a given trial. Why should this be so? And how can we design the trial and set up the primary eff...

Descriptive vs. inferential cheating

Given the recent and highly publicized scandals involving psychology researchers who cheated, the proliferation of articles on related topics is unsurprising. As an example, Simons et al. (2011) pointed out subtle ways in which researchers can increase their false positive rate above the nominal level of p < 0.05. From my perspective, a major limitation of the literature on cheating has been a ...

Restenosis, statistics, and reasonable inferences.

ith great interest I read the report by Weissman et al. (1) regarding ntravascular ultrasound (IVUS) analysis of polymer-based aclitaxel-eluting stents. The investigators stated in the text that positive remodeling assessed as the absolute increase in the xternal elastic membrane volume over time tended to be slightly ore prominent with the TAXUS stent (7.66 48.64 mm vs. 12.29 36.05 mm, respect...

From the descriptive towards inferential statistics: hundred years since conception of the Student's t-distribution.

It is crucially important to differentiate between the descriptive statistics on one side and inferential, inductive, mathematical statistics on the other. Only the latter is useful for obtaining the optimal information and for making effective decisions under conditions of uncertainty, because it defines probabilities of conclusions. That, of course, gains the real importance only in situation...

Effect Size vs Inferential Statistics