Resolving the Issue of How Reliability is Related to Statistical Power: Adhering to Mathematical Definitions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reliability in classical test theory is a population-dependent concept, defined as a ratio of true-score variance and observed-score variance, where observed-score variance is a sum of true and error components. On the other hand, the power of a statistical significance test is a function of the total variance, irrespective of its decomposition into true and error components. For that reason, the reliability of a dependent variable is a function of the ratio of true-score variance and observed-score variance, whereas statistical power is a function of the sum of the same two variances. Controversies about how reliability is related to statistical power often can be explained by authors’ use of the term “reliability” in a general way to mean “consistency,” “precision,” or “dependability,” which does not always correspond to its mathematical definition as a variance ratio. The present note shows how adherence to the mathematical definition can help resolve the issue and presents some derivations and illustrative examples that have further implications for significance testing and practical research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.133 | 0.468 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".