Thursday, 26 February 2015

Ban on the use of P values in statistics

P values are widely used in science to test null hypotheses. For example, in a medical study looking at smoking and cancer, the null hypothesis could be that there is no link between the two. The closer to zero the P value gets, the greater the chance the null hypothesis is false; many researchers accept findings as ‘significant’ if the P value comes in at less than 0.05. But P values are slippery, and sometimes, significant P values vanish when experiments and statistical analyses are repeated (see Nature 506, 150–152; 2014).
http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700