4,344 research outputs found
Toward evidence-based medical statistics. 1: The P value fallacy.
An important problem exists in the interpretation of modern medical research data: Biological understanding and previous research play little formal role in the interpretation of quantitative results. This phenomenon is manifest in the discussion sections of research articles and ultimately can affect the reliability of conclusions. The standard statistical approach has created this situation by promoting the illusion that conclusions can be produced with certain "error rates," without consideration of information from outside the experiment. This statistical approach, the key components of which are P values and hypothesis tests, is widely perceived as a mathematically coherent approach to inference. There is little appreciation in the medical community that the methodology is an amalgam of incompatible elements, whose utility for scientific inference has been the subject of intense debate among statisticians for almost 70 years. This article introduces some of the key elements of that debate and traces the appeal and adverse impact of this methodology to the P value fallacy, the mistaken idea that a single number can capture both the long-run outcomes of an experiment and the evidential meaning of a single result. This argument is made as a prelude to the suggestion that another measure of evidence should be used-the Bayes factor, which properly separates issues of long-run behavior from evidential strength and allows the integration of background knowledge with statistical findings
Integrating comparative effectiveness research programs into predictive health: A unique role for academic health centers
Abstract The growing burden of chronic disease, an aging population, and rising health care costs threaten the sustainability of our current model for health care delivery
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Uncertainty quantification in reacting flow modeling.
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in the computational modeling of physical systems is important for scientific investigation, engineering design, and model validation. In this work we develop techniques for UQ based on spectral and pseudo-spectral polynomial chaos (PC) expansions, and we apply these constructions in computations of reacting flow. We develop and compare both intrusive and non-intrusive spectral PC techniques. In the intrusive construction, the deterministic model equations are reformulated using Galerkin projection into a set of equations for the time evolution of the field variable PC expansion mode strengths. The mode strengths relate specific parametric uncertainties to their effects on model outputs. The non-intrusive construction uses sampling of many realizations of the original deterministic model, and projects the resulting statistics onto the PC modes, arriving at the PC expansions of the model outputs. We investigate and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and identify their utility under different conditions. We also outline areas where ongoing and future research are needed to address challenges with both approaches
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