Probability that p-value provides misleading evidence cannot be controlled by sample size
1
Biomedical Center Martin, Jessenius Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University in Bratislava, Martin, Slovak Republic
2
Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Epidemiology, Statistics
- Keywords
- p-value, statistical evidence, desideratum, misleading evidence, ratio of likelihoods, Bayes Factor
- Copyright
- © 2017 Grendar et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Probability that p-value provides misleading evidence cannot be controlled by sample size. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2869v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2869v1
Abstract
A measure of statistical evidence should permit the sample size determination so that the probability M of obtaining (strong) misleading evidence can be held as low as desired. On this desideratum the p-value fails completely, as it leads either to an arbitrary sample size if M >= 0.01 or no sample size at all, if M < 0.01.
Unlike the p-value, the ratio of likelihoods, the ratio of posteriors, as well as the Bayes Factor, permit controlling the probability of misleading evidence by the sample size.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.