Fiducialize statistical significance: transforming<i>p</i>-values into conservative posterior probabilities and Bayes factors
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
One remedy to the misuse of p-values transforms them to bounds on Bayes factors. With a prior probability of the null hypothesis, such a bound gives a lower bound on the posterior probability. Unfortunately, knowing a posterior probability is above some number cannot ensure that the null hypothesis is improbable enough to warrant its rejection. For example, if the lower bound is 0.0001, that implies that the posterior probability is at least 0.0001 but does not imply it is lower than 0.05 or even 0.9. A fiducial argument suggests an alternative estimate of the posterior probability that the null hypothesis is true. In the case that the prior probability of the null hypothesis is 50%, the estimated posterior probability is about p(lnp)2 for low p. In other cases, each occurrence of p in the formula is the p-value calibrated by multiplying it by the prior odds of the null hypothesis. In the absence of a prior, p(lnp)2 also serves as an asymptotic Bayes factor. Since the fiducial estimate of the posterior probability is greater than the lower bounds, its use in place of a bound leads to more stringent hypothesis testing. Making that replacement in a rationale for 0.005 as the significance level reduces the level to 0.001.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.098 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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