Multiple comparisons

by John on March 21, 2008

Multiple comparisons present a conundrum in classical statistics. The options seem to be:

  1. do nothing and tolerate a high false positive rate
  2. be extremely conservative and tolerate a high false negative rate
  3. do something ad hoc between the extremes

A new paper by Andrew Gelman, Jennifer Hill, and Masanao Yajima opens with “The problem of multiple comparisons can disappear when viewed from a Bayesian perspective.” I would clarify that the resolution comes not from the Bayesian perspective per se but from the Bayesian hierarchical perspective.

See this blog post for a link to the article “Why we (usually) don’t have to worry about multiple comparisons” and to a presentation by the same title.

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