Preliminary Testing for Normality: Is This a Good Practice?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Normality is a distributional requirement of classical test statistics. In order for the test statistic to provide valid results leading to sound and reliable conclusions this requirement must be satisfied. In the not too distant past, it was claimed that violations of normality would not likely jeopardize scientific findings (See Hsu & Feldt, 1969; Lunney, 1970). Recent revelations suggest otherwise (See e.g., Micceri, 1989; Keselman, Huberty, Lix et al., 1998; Erceg-Hurn, Wilcox, & Keselman, 2013; Wilcox and Keselman, 2003; Wilcox, 2012a, b). Unfortunately the data obtained in psychological investigations rarely, if ever, meet the requirement of normally distributed data (Micceri, 1989; Wilcox, 2012a, b). Consequently, it could be the case that the results from many of the investigations conducted in psychology provide invalid results. Accordingly, authors recommend that researchers attempt to assess the validity of assuming data are normal in form prior to conducting a test of significance (Erceg-Hurn, et al., 2013; Keselman, et al., 1998). Present evidence suggests that a popular fit-statistic, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test does a poor job of evaluating whether data are normal. Our investigation based on this statistic and other fit-statistics provides a more favorable picture of preliminary testing for normality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.172 | 0.245 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 it