To P or not to P is that the question? Rethinking experimental design and data analysis to improve biological significance beyond the statistical significance

摘要

In a assay published in Nature, Valentin Amrhein (University of Basel) and its colleagues Sander Greenland (University of California) & Blake McShane (Northwestern University), present a series of arguments against the stablished “P value-based statistical significance dichotomania”.1 The authors use some insightful practical examples, such as data related to unintended effects of anti-inflammatory drugs risks, and consider the influence of human cognitive trend to simplistically bucket results into “statistically significant” and “statistically non-significant” categories and to consider it definitely different.