Date: 2018-11-23

Time: 15:30-16:30

Location: BURN 1104

Abstract:

This is not a research talk. Rather, the goal is to address the topic of the talk title through a 2017 multi-authored paper published in Nature Human Behaviour. The Nature article proposes that the standard cut-off significance level of .05 should be replaced by a cut-off level of .005 when new discoveries are being claimed. The authors attribute the high proportion of irreducible results in the literature that accompany claimed new discoveries, in part, to the low-bar cut-off of .05. Their fix is built around the Bayes factor. I will begin with a brief presentation of the difference between the frequentist and Bayesian approaches to statistical inference, and lead into p-values vs Bayes factors for hypothesis testing before discussing the Nature article itself. It is hoped that the talk will provoke thought about the way we do statistics.

Speaker

David Wolfson is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University. His research interest is on survival analysis and statistical applications to medicine.

Organized by the McGill Statistics Group

Seminar website: https://mcgillstat.github.io/