Questions tagged [p-hacking]

Misuse of data analysis to find patterns that can be presented as statistically significant. Done by performing many statistical tests and only reporting those that have yielded significant results.

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Fine-tuning of methods before main analysis: p-value hacking?

I am reviewing a paper for a journal. The authors propose a new classification scheme. They then try to assess the classification accuracy using some novel predictor data. Standard classification ...
user7831861's user avatar
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Local regression to overcome autocorrelation?

I'm facing a very similar situation to the question found here. I'd like to test whether the slope of time series data changes at a particular point and I'm aiming for a simple test. The proposed ...
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Does p-hacking affect the Type II (False Negative) error rate?

I know that p-hacking (also know as data dredging) increases the Type I error rate as exemplified by this XKCD example. My question is whether it influences the Type II error rate. I'm not sure ...
sloth's user avatar
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Double dipping/p-hacking and interim sample size reestimation

When one applies interim sample size reestimation based on nuisance parameter estimates (observe fraction of initial sample size, estimate nuisance parameter(s) based on the obtained data, reestimate ...
gir emee's user avatar
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Dishonest approach to multiple testing

Has the following --dishonest-- approach been discussed somewhere? Has it a name? I am trying to grasp what intrinsic assumption it violates but I am struggling to find the relevant keywords for the ...
ocram's user avatar
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Is there a risk of p-hacking when trying many models?

I am familiar with the concept of p-hacking for statistical tests, but does p-hacking apply to model building? Say you are trying many different linear models with a variety of variables, interactions,...
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Why is ANOVA not p-hacking?

Say we have some data with many parameters. As an example let's say I'm an not-so-ethical journalist working for a food website and I'm looking to write some clickbait article "backed by science&...
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Is this p-hacking?

I'm currently looking into the gender pay gap using data from glass door (found via kaggle). The dataset has columns for gender, age, performance evaluations of employees, seniority, pay etc. For ...
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Example of multiple comparisons problem

Pharma companies can get FDA approvals on multiple indications for a single drug, e.g. different kinds of cancers. I was reading about the multiple comparisons problem, i.e. an effective inflation of ...
Golden_Ratio's user avatar
11 votes
2 answers
573 views

Increasing sample size to obtain width of CI / SE: p-hacking?

I'm involved in running experiments, where we want to obtain sufficient sample size to obtain a certain width of CI (or equivalently a certain power). We currently run a pilot, of a few hundred units, ...
Jeremy Miles's user avatar
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What is the difference between p-hacking and data mining bias?

From my understanding, data mining bias occurs when someone repeatedly searches through a data set to find statistically significant results. How is this any different from p-hacking? What is the ...
Flux's user avatar
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Stop collecting data when our confidence interval is sufficiently narrow?

I am running an experiment that is unpleasant and time-consuming, so I want to minimize the number of times I have to do it. I have done a sample size calculation to determine that I need $100$ ...
Dave's user avatar
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Data dredging in machine learning by training multiple models

Many machine learning papers I read follow something like this procedure: Split into test and train set, train different models on the train set and evaluate their performance on the test set, report ...
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Bonferroni correction versus the F-test

Many sources emphasize the importance of the F-test p-value in multiple regression and justify this in terms of p-hacking. It's kind of intuitive that if you can't reject the null hypothesis that all ...
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Is adding batches of samples to a non-stat sig sample p-hacking?

Here's my scenario. I take 1000 samples each from my control and treatment. I note that the difference in means is not statistically significant (stat-sig) under the null hypothesis testing. I then ...
Data Max's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
93 views

Does running multiple similar models lead to p-hacking?

In my analysis I am testing a lot of similar models. I have two variables (let´s call them A and B) and a whole bunch of other variables (C1....C10). All models have the same approach: It is always ...
heyho's user avatar
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ROC-style curves for calculating sample size, power, alpha, and effect size

I found an awesome R package called pwr that does all sorts of calculations about sample sizes, power, effect sizes, and so on, and I've been playing. I have a ...
Dave's user avatar
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2 votes
1 answer
299 views

Does principal component analysis (PCA) lead to p-hacking?

My knowledge of principal component analysis is only conceptual; I know nothing about the nuts and bolts of how it works. I learned about it from its use in sociolinguistics, as in Horvath & D. ...
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