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Record W2089286873 · doi:10.1037/h0087425

The p-value fallacy and how to avoid it.

2003· article· en· W2089286873 on OpenAlexaff
Peter Dixon

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicAdvanced Text Analysis Techniques
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFallacyNull hypothesisPsychologyValue (mathematics)Statistical hypothesis testingInterpretation (philosophy)p-valueEconometricsStatisticsAlternative hypothesisInferenceCognitive psychologyMathematicsEpistemologyArtificial intelligenceComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Null hypothesis significance tests are commonly used to provide a link between empirical evidence and theoretical interpretation. However, this strategy is prone to the "p-value fallacy" in which effects and interactions are classified as either "noise" or "real" based on whether the associated p value is greater or less than .05. This dichotomous classification can lead to dramatic misconstruals of the evidence provided by an experiment. For example, it is quite possible to have similar patterns of means that lead to entirely different patterns of significance, and one can easily find the same patterns of significance that are associated with completely different patterns of means. Describing data in terms of an inventory of significant and nonsignificant effects can thus completely misrepresent the results. An alternative analytical technique is to identify competing interpretations of the data and then use likelihood ratios to assess which interpretation provides the better account. Several different methods of calculating the likelihood ratios are illustrated. It is argued that this approach satisfies a principle of "graded evidence," according to which similar data should provide similar evidence.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.151
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.552
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.849
Threshold uncertainty score0.799

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1510.552
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0030.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.002
Bibliometrics0.0080.008
Science and technology studies0.0030.037
Scholarly communication0.0080.018
Open science0.0070.008
Research integrity0.0140.026
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.006

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.315
Teacher spread0.286 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainMethods
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations88
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueCanadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentaleSame topicAdvanced Text Analysis TechniquesFrench-language works237,207