Détente: A Practical Understanding of P values and Bayesian Posterior Probabilities
Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) with its benchmark P value < 0.05 has long been a stalwart of scientific reporting and such statistically significant findings have been used to imply scientifically or clinically significant findings. Challenges to this approach have arisen over the pa...
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| Published in: | Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics Vol. 109; no. 6; pp. 1489 - 1498 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
01.06.2021
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| ISSN: | 0009-9236, 1532-6535, 1532-6535 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) with its benchmark P value < 0.05 has long been a stalwart of scientific reporting and such statistically significant findings have been used to imply scientifically or clinically significant findings. Challenges to this approach have arisen over the past 6 decades, but they have largely been unheeded. There is a growing movement for using Bayesian statistical inference to quantify the probability that a scientific finding is credible. There have been differences of opinion between the frequentist (i.e., NHST) and Bayesian schools of inference, and warnings about the use or misuse of P values have come from both schools of thought spanning many decades. Controversies in this arena have been heightened by the American Statistical Association statement on P values and the further denouncement of the term “statistical significance” by others. My experience has been that many scientists, including many statisticians, do not have a sound conceptual grasp of the fundamental differences in these approaches, thereby creating even greater confusion and acrimony. If we let A represent the observed data, and B represent the hypothesis of interest, then the fundamental distinction between these two approaches can be described as the frequentist approach using the conditional probability pr(A | B) (i.e., the P value), and the Bayesian approach using pr(B | A) (the posterior probability). This paper will further explain the fundamental differences in NHST and Bayesian approaches and demonstrate how they can co‐exist harmoniously to guide clinical trial design and inference. |
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| Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 ObjectType-Review-3 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0009-9236 1532-6535 1532-6535 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/cpt.2004 |