Common Errors in Statistics (and How to Avoid Them), 4th Edition

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On the necessity for improvements in the use of statistics in research publications, see Altman [1982, 1991, 1994, 2000, 2002]; Cooper and Rosenthal [1980]; Dar, Serlin, and Omer [1994]; Gardner and Bond [1990]; George [1985]; Glantz [1980]; Goodman, Altman, and George [1998]; MacArthur and Jackson [1984]; Morris [1988]; Strasak et al. [2007]; Thorn et al. [1985]; and Tyson et al. [1983].

Brockman and Chowdhury [1997] discuss the costly errors that can result from treating chaotic phenomena as stochastic.

Notes

¹  This is from an inquiry at the University of East Anglia headed by Lord Oxburgh. The inquiry was the result of emails from climate scientists being released to the public.

²  City of New York v. Department of Commerce, 822 F. Supp. 906 (E.D.N.Y, 1993). The arguments of four statistical experts who testified in the case may be found in Volume 34 of Jurimetrics, 1993, 64–115.

³  A website with pictures is located at http://www.foldmoney.com/.

⁴  Remember “cold fusion”? In 1989, two University of Utah professors told the newspapers they could fuse deuterium molecules in the laboratory, solving the world’s energy problems for years to come. Alas, neither those professors nor anyone else could replicate their findings, though true believers abound (see http://www.ncas.org/erab/intro.htm).

⁵  A p-value is the probability under the primary hypothesis of observing the set of observations we have in hand. We can calculate a p-value once we make a series of assumptions ...