Talk:Misuse of statistics

message: The paragraphs on data dredging seem completely reasonable to me.  I checked them against the main data dredging page, and against my textbook.
However, I thought that it would be far too possible for people casually checking this page to use this section as reason to believe that this kind of analysis is always wrong, and that's just not true.  So I added a short paragraph explaining the caveat: it's OK to do it as long as you check yourself!
This is the first time I've edited Wikipedia... hope I did it right.71.193.16.80 (talk) 17:53, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Data Dredging

message: "In marketing terms all a company has to do to promote a neutral (useless) product is to find or conduct, for example, 20 studies with a confidence level of 95%. Even if the product is really useless, on average one of the 20 studies will show a positive effect purely by chance (this is what a 95% level of confidence means)"
The 95% C.I refers to the "middle" 95% of the distribution; this means that the outer 5% of the data counts both over and under the interval.  So to just consider the "unusually good" experiments would only be the top 2.5% of the sample.  
Long story short, I think that on average, only 1 in 40 studies will show the positive effect
P.S: It's kind of ironic that an article about the misuse of statistics would (accidently) misuse statistics
Akshayaj 21:31, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It depends on whether the significance test is one-tailed or two tailed. In this case, a one-tailed test would be used, so a false positive would arise in 1 out of 20 cases. In a two tailed test, one in 40 would be a false positive and one in 40 would be a false negative.--Wikiman2718 (talk) 18:40, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Almost certain that this interpretation of the 95% C.I is wrong

message: "Data mining is the examination of large compilations of statistics in order to find a correlation.  Since the required confidence interval to establish a relationship between two parameters is usually pegged at 95% (meaning that there is a 95% chance that two parameters are related), there is also a 5% chance to find a correlation between two sets of completely random variables."
Usually, a researcher says there is a significant relationship between two R.Vs if they can reject the Null Hypothesis, which means that there is <5% chance of this correlation showing up just by chance.  While this is basically what the paragraph above is saying, I think it confuses the issue, as well as unfairly always pegs the error rate at 5%.
As I'm not really sure how this is different from the section I editted above, I'll delete it and let someone who knows the specifics of data mining edit it back in.
Akshayaj 21:51, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Oversimplification of C.I (again)

message: I see the data mining section has been put back in.  I'm pretty sure this setion is incorrect.  For one thing, nobody ever uses Confidence Intervals to establish correlations, but rather uses R^2.
The idea that there's a 5% chance that two independent variables show correlation "just by chance" is wrong
However, I'm no expert on data mining, so I'll defer to the author of the paragraph and ask for another poster to confirm or deny.
Akshayaj 19:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Update

message: " With a subject on which the general public has no personal knowledge of, you can fool a lot of people. For example you can say on TV "Most autistics are hopelessly incurable if raised without parents or normal education" and many people will only remember the first part of the claim, "Most autistics are hopelessly incurable". "
The suggestion that autism is curable is itself arguable. Whether hopelessly or otherwise - the behavioural symptoms can be addressed, but the underlying condition cannot be cured. 
Unfortunately I can't think of a better alternative - but this is a wrong 'un.
:Indented line I rewrote this section with better examples and proper citations. Jdoucett (talk) 02:38, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  bad example 

message: Obviously there are unlimited examples of people with something to sell abusing statistics, but lets keep the examples here off of hot button issues, there's no benefit to it and people can debate contemporary topics under the appropriate topic headings.  The Michael Fumento bit reads like an example of the very thing it's attempting to illustrate: selective reporting.  And its citation is a dead link. --DKEdwards 21:12, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quality of the article and NPOV 

message: I only tagged the section Linguistically asserting unit measure when it is empirically violated for jargon, though other sections might need cleanup too. But that example needs to be completely rewritten, because there is no way the average reader can make any sense of it. I have a background in stats and I am not even sure what that section means.--70.80.234.196 (talk) 18:14, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I've just deleted the whole section. It's very opaque, and seems off-topic to me - more about probability axioms than statistics. --Avenue (talk) 21:56, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jargon... 

message: The introductory comments seem extreme given the lack of references.  Are there any references for this?  If professional statisticians fool themselves, by which standard do we judge this exactly? 68.35.128.100 (talk) 00:58, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introductory Comments 

message: Another quite common problem with statistics is that for many people what seems to be only important is if the zero hypothesis is true or not, but not how strong the correlation actually is. For example people want to know if smoking can cause cancer, but if, e.g. only one of 10 billion smokers would get cancer they would consider 'smoking causes cancer' an important statement, although for practical purposes the risk would be neglectable compared to other cancer risk factors. In other words the difference between 'nobody gets cancer from smoking' to '1 in 10 billion people gets cancer from smoking' is considered more important than the difference between '1 in 10 billion people gets cancer from smoking' and '1 in 20 people gets cancer from smoking'. This problem is related to the so-called Zero-risk_bias, but creating sensation news headlines from very small correlations imho should also be considered misuse of statistics. O.mangold (talk) 12:21, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Zero hypothesis vs. neglectable small correlation 

message: In my experience, the most basic misuse of statistics, particularly prevalent in the (news) media, is to take probabilities relevant to a general situation and apply them to a specific instance. Should this be added to the article, perhaps in the introduction?
Perhaps it is not so much a misuse of statistics, as a misunderstanding of statistics or ill-education?
Spartan26 (talk) 02:36, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: An important question is whether you can find a good citation for someone pointing out this problem. Melcombe (talk) 08:46, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Most basic misuse of statistics? 

message: I challenge the Non-enduring class fallacies section.  Google searches all ultimately point to this article as the source.  Unless citations are produced the section will be deleted.172.250.105.20 (talk) 19:49, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Done.172.250.105.20 (talk) 17:50, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Challenge 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified  on Misuse of statistics. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/agdbasev7wr/bocsar/documents/pdf/cjb153.pdf
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7460-large-study-links-power-lines-to-childhood-cancer.html
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=214
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.ejgm.org/upload/sayi/1016/EJGM-00166.pdf
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://biostat.home.uludag.edu.tr/Review%20Of%20Reliability%20And%20Factors%20Affecting%20The%20Reliability%20.pdf
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thread_title:  External links modified