Biology 708, McMaster University

Introduction

This week is the introduction to the main statistical part of the course. We will be grappling with difficult, abstract questions about what we mean by scientific and statistical inference and about statistical philosophies.

Time spent grappling with these questions will make you a better scientist, and will provide you a strong foundation to navigate the various detailed questions that arise from particular questions and approaches.

Resources

• Lecture notes Slides
• Power analysis (notes, slides)
• Fisher and Neyman-Pearson

Assignment

Pick one paper in your field. It can be a paper from your lab group or just a paper that you like. Carefully read any sections of the paper that report the results of statistical tests (including tests of assumptions; effects of nuisance parameters/covariates; and the primary scientific inferences). Write a document that gives the bibliographic reference of the paper and, for at least three of the tests done by the authors, (1) quote their presentation of the test results; (2) describe the issues, if any, with their presentation; (3) if there is any room for improvement in the presentation, write a revised statement that more accurately reflects what inferences we should make from the results. Table 1 of Dushoff, Kain, and Bolker (2019) may be useful (although you are not required to use “clarity” language).

See the assignment page to submit. Remember to email us the name of your repo file. Don’t submit in a proprietary format, like Word. Plain text is best, PDF is also OK.

Readings

• Please read Nuzzo (2014); Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011); Harrell (2017) (references below). They should not be too hard to get through. Think about your own statistical philosophy and be prepared to talk about what statistical inference means to you.

We have listed a bunch of additional readings below: feel free to dip in!

You can also check out this fun web site on spurious correlations

References