BACKGROUND Controversies are common in medicine. Some arise when the conclusions of research publications directly contradict each other, creating uncertainty for frontline clinicians. DISCUSSION In this paper, we review how researchers can look at very similar data yet have completely different conclusions based purely on an over-reliance of statistical significance and an unclear understand...

Abstract: High accuracy should not be the only goal of classification: information concerning probable alternatives diagnoses, probability of these diagnoses, evaluation of confidence in classification, are also important. Neural models are used just to obtain the winner class but do not provide any justification for their recommendations – they work as black boxes. A method which determine con...

When public health practitioners use health statistics, sometimes they are interested in the actual number of health events, but more often they use the statistics to assess the true underlying risk of a health problem in the community. Observed health statistics, that is, those counts, rates or percentages that are computed or estimated from health surveys, vital statistics registries, or othe...

Classical confidence intervals are often misunderstood by particle physicists and the general public alike. The confusion arises from the two different definitions of probability in common use. As a result, there is general dissatisfaction when confidence intervals are empty or they exclude parameter values for which the experiment is insensitive. In order to clarify these issues, the relation ...

Generalized pivotal quantities (GPQs) and generalized confidence intervals (GCIs) have proven to be useful tools for making inferences in many practical problems. Although GCIs are not guaranteed to have exact frequentist coverage, a number of published and unpublished simulation studies suggest that the coverage probabilities of such intervals are sufficiently close to their nominal value so a...