Inference. Assumptions/approximations are useful for lots of math. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. The properties of estimators such as their mean (center of mass) and standard deviation (second moment of deviations) are very intuitive to physicists. One good example of such statistical misconduct is data dredging.

And we do a great job, all things considered. home economics), it appears none of your argument would change. It certainly includes an element of philosophy, but I don't think it is the only branch of mathematics where that is the case (see e.g. Therefore one should also be able to spot the scope and relevance of a statistical study and understand it in the context of the study within which it was intended. But what is this p-value really? There's certainly a degree of subjectivity in frequentist hypothesis testing, but it's the same kind of subjectivity that gets invoked when interpreting a Bayes Factor. Statistics PhDs do not have to "contribute to the body of mathematical concepts." This means you're free to copy, share and adapt any parts (or all) of the text in the article, as long as you give appropriate credit and provide a link/reference to this page.

Could you suggest a better simple language interpretation of the p-value? I think the key difference between "chemistry", "engineering", and "balancing my checkbook" is that those fields just use existing mathematical concepts. This is a sensitive topic for many--for example, many college math departments are still trying to treat statisticians as mathematicians, to the detriment of both--and so it's likely to elicit some strong reactions. Chemistry/Engineering PhD candidates don't have that requirement to my knowledge. What LEGO piece is this arc with ball joint? This course is a traditional introduction to statistics and is a little more computationally based than Math 160.

Perhaps the language of statistics was in part born out of the need to generalize such concepts as to apply to these fields. If we're going to reject the null, then we want this probability to be small, to approach zero. Thanks for contributing an answer to Cross Validated! It's not clear to me how your p-value interpretation/definition differs from the alternative I offered in my last comment. Consider hypothesis testing with p-values. This was an educated guess. eval(ez_write_tag([[300,250],'explorable_com-medrectangle-4','ezslot_3',340,'0','0']));To understand what statistics is, it is important to look at the broad categories of problems that are tackled with the help of statistics.

Check out our quiz-page with tests about: Siddharth Kalla (Feb 6, 2011). So clearly an admission of the limits, or stated another way "assuming XYZ the following is valid", to a branch of math doesn't disqualify the branch from being "true" math. The Einstein quote was the tongue in cheek bit, and wasn't meant to be taken seriously; I'm pretty sure it isn't quite what Einstein actually had in mind! My intention was to make a point about statistics, not provide a tutorial on interpreting p-values. @whuber I'm tough enough to stand a few down-votes regardless. Statistical tools often make simplifying assumptions to reduce the messy real world data to something that fits into the problem domain of a solved mathematical abstraction. Similarly, contrast your characterization with what, The p-value is not the probability that we are wrong when we reject the null hypothesis, as that also depends on H1 which does not enter into the calculation of the p-value (well illustrated by. Statistics is the study of numerical information, called data.

In the end, the statistical analysis should be able to tell us something concrete about the sample that we are studying. Take it with you wherever you go. To understand statistics, one needs to study and understand the probability theory. I believe (this might be blatantly wrong) that in order to earn a PhD in statistics you have to contribute, in some way, to expanding the body of mathematical concepts. You don't need our permission to copy the article; just include a link/reference back to this page. Use MathJax to format equations. With respect to (3), consider the following list of disciplines: All of these disciplines could easily be classified as “applied statistics”. Statistics uses math, but it is not math.

The properties of a triangle that I learned about in grade school I believe are considered true math, even though they don't hold true in non-Elucidean geometry. Is it too late for me to get into competitive chess? It mostly seems to proceed from confused premises. The p-value is the probability of a result at least as extreme as that observed.

In our specific example, we found that the probability of observing the data we gathered if the null hypothesis were true was just $0.1\%$, so we rejected the null. What is the benefit of having FIPS hardware-level encryption on a drive when you can use Veracrypt instead?

;).

Based on the evidence, we formed an educated opinion, but it's still a gamble. If you were to replace "statistics" by "chemistry," "economics," Was the theory of special relativity sparked by a dream about cows being electrocuted?

Unlike those other disciplines, statistics gets lumped in with math in headlines.