Beyond P values and Hypothesis Testing: Using the Minimum Bayes Factor to Teach Statistical Inference in Undergraduate Introductory Statistics Courses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While interest in Bayesian statistics has been growing in statistics education, the treatment of the topic is still inadequate in both textbooks and the classroom. Because so many fields of study lead to careers that involve a decision-making process requiring an understanding of Bayesian methods, it is becoming increasingly clear that Bayesian methods should be included in classes that cover the P value and Hypothesis Testing. We discuss several fallacies associated with the P value and Hypothesis Testing, including why Fisher’s P value and Neyman-Pearson’s Hypothesis Tests are incompatible with each other and cannot be combined to answer the question “What is the probability of the truth of one’s belief based on the evidence?” We go on to explain how the Minimum Bayes Factor can be used as an alternative to frequentist methods, and why the Bayesian approach results in more accurate, credible, and relevant test results when measuring the strength of the evidence. We conclude that educators must realize the importance of teaching the correct interpretation of Fisher’s P value and its alternative, the Bayesian approach, to students in an introductory statistics course.
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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 | 0.023 | 0.118 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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".