Statistical Analysis Stack Exchange
Statistical Analysis Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [methodology]

For questions about statistical methodology or choice of statistical methods.

310 questions
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When to use Fisher and Neyman-Pearson framework?

I've been reading a lot lately about the differences between Fisher's method of hypothesis testing and the Neyman-Pearson school of thought. My question is, ignoring philosophical objections for a moment; when should we use the Fisher's approach of…
Stijn
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Choosing a clustering method

When using cluster analysis on a data set to group similar cases, one needs to choose among a large number of clustering methods and measures of distance. Sometimes, one choice might influence the other, but there are many possible combinations of…
Brett
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60
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Most famous statisticians

What are the most important statisticians, and what is it that made them famous? (Reply just one scientist per answer please.)
mariana soffer
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45
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Determining sample size necessary for bootstrap method / Proposed Method

I know this is a rather hot topic where no one really can give a simple answer for. Nevertheless I am wondering if the following approach couldn’t be useful. The bootstrap method is only useful if your sample follows more or less (read exactly) the…
siegfried
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25
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3 answers

Top five classifiers to try first

Besides obvious classifier characteristics like computational cost, expected data types of features/labels and suitability for certain sizes and dimensions of data sets, what are the top five (or 10, 20?) classifiers to try first on a new data set…
Oben Sonne
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Is Joel Spolsky's "Hunting of the Snark" post valid statistical content analysis?

If you've been reading the community bulletins lately, you've likely seen The Hunting of the Snark, a post on the official StackExchange blog by Joel Spolsky, the CEO of the StackExchange network. He discusses a statistical analysis conducted on a…
Christopher
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Is a priori power analysis essentially useless?

I attended a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology last week where I saw a talk by Uri Simonsohn with the premise that using an a priori power analysis to determine sample size was essentially useless because its results are…
Patrick S. Forscher
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Choosing seasonal decomposition method

Seasonal adjustment is a crucial step preprocessing the data for further research. Researcher however has a number of options for trend-cycle-seasonal decomposition. The most common (judging by the number of citations in empirical literature) rival…
Dmitrij Celov
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1 answer

How to visualize a 3-D density function?

What is the best way graphically to visualize a 3-D density function? As in I would like to visualize $$z=f_{X,Y}(x,y)$$? Not necessary but R code for this would be great.
user30490
16
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1 answer

Objective vs. subjective Bayesian paradigms

What is the difference between objective and subjective Bayesian paradigms? What objects or procedures do they define or interpret differently? Is there any difference in their choice of methods?
Richard Hardy
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Examples of costly consequences from improper use of statistical tools

I suspect that most users of statistical tools are ancillary users (folks who have had little to no formal training in statistics). It’s very tempting for researchers and other professionals to apply statistical methods to their data simply because…
MannyG
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Is publishing work based on post hoc analysis problematic?

Nowadays, in the scientific domain, increasingly, people in the top position argue against doing post-hoc analysis and they advise against collecting a bunch of data and just make up a story after data collection and report the significant findings.…
JetLag
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What are some good frameworks for method selection?

I have been looking into theoretical frameworks for method selection (note: not model selection) and have found very little systematic, mathematically-motivated work. By 'method selection', I mean a framework for distinguishing the appropriate (or…
John L. Taylor
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Is it worthwhile to publish at the refereed wiki StatProb.com?

Background I read about StatProb.com from a comment on Andrew Gelman's Blog. According to the website, StatProb is: StatProb: The Encyclopedia Sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies combines the advantages of traditional wikis (rapid…
Abe
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Is it ok to fit a Bayesian model first, then begin weakening priors?

When doing frequentist stats, there is a long list of big no-nos, like looking at the results of statistical tests before deciding to collect more data. I'm wondering generally if there are a similar list of no-nos for the methodologies involved in…
JoFrhwld
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