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Responses
2 pages discussion
After this write 2 reply on others discussion
about 100 words for each reply.
 
First Part Write 1 page
Prompt:
Find some examples of the misuses of p-values that have been reported in the popular literature.
If you were testing people for the presence of COVID-19 antibodies, which error would you be most concerned with and why?
 
Second Part Write 1 page
Urban Transportation options
Urban travelers usually have several options for taking trips, especially when commuting to work.
(You are a student live in Los Angeles or San Francisco)
 
Lesson for first part
If there is any one single area that statistics gets a bad rep it’s hypothesis testing. The issue isn’t the underlying theory, it is the use to which it is put and how sometimes more is made of it than the theory permits. The issues surrounding hypothesis testing and statistical significance include: 1) statistical significance is not the same as practical importance; 2) dichotomizing into significant and nonsignificant results encourages the dismissal of observed differences in favour of the usually less interesting null hypothesis of no difference; 3) and any particular threshold for setting significance is arbitrary. The problem is so large that the American Statistical Association, the

US’s society for professional statisticians, found it necessary to issue a statement about the use of p-values. I’ve included in this Module’s Assets folder the ASA’s statement and a relevant paper. I urge you to read them. (I’ve also included three cartoons by Randall Munroe whose website https://xkcd.com/ is almost always amusing and insightful about an amazing variety of topics.)
We begin by setting up the hypothesis testing framework. Hypothesis testing requires a null and an alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis is often treated as if it is the maintained hypothesis, that is, it is the presumed state of the world prior to having data. The data will inform us whether it is consistent or not with that state of the world. The alternative hypothesis is often taken to be that the state of the world is not as implied by the null hypothesis. The question immediately arises: In what way is that so? The alternative hypothesis presumably embodies the view of the world that rejecting the null hypothesis implies. So, the null and alternative hypotheses need to be viewed as a disjoint pair of sets, with the alternative hypothesis the complement of the parameter space of the null hypothesis. There are a variety of ways to characterize those disjoint sets – H0 >= value, Ha