Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Do You Use P-Values and Confidence Intervals?

Unless your econometrics training has been true-blue Bayesian in nature, you'll have reported a lot of p-values, and constructed heaps of confidence intervals in your time.

Both of these concepts have been the centre of widespread controversy in the statistics literature since their inception. It's probably good to be aware of this - just so you don't go and "shoot yourself in the foot" at some stage.

Economist/econometrician Aris Spanos has published an interesting and readable piece about all of this In a recent issue of the journal, Ecology. His paper is titled, "Recurring Controversies About P Values and Confidence Intervals Revisited". You can read a summary on the Error Statistics blog, here.

I strongly recommend this paper.

© 2014, David E. Giles

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