Freudian hypothesis testing

Sigmund Freud

In his paper Mindless statistics, Gerd Gigerenzer uses a Freudian analogy to describe the mental conflict researchers experience over statistical hypothesis testing. He says that the “statistical ritual” of NHST (null hypothesis significance testing) “is a form of conflict resolution, like compulsive hand washing.”

In Gigerenzer’s analogy, the id represents Bayesian analysis. Deep down, a researcher wants to know the probabilities of hypotheses being true. This is something that Bayesian statistics makes possible, but more conventional frequentist statistics does not.

The ego represents R. A. Fisher’s significance testing: specify a null hypothesis only, not an alternative, and report a p-value. Significance is calculated after collecting the data. This makes it easy to publish papers. The researcher never clearly states his hypothesis, and yet takes credit for having established it after rejecting the null. This leads to feelings of guilt and shame.

The superego represents the Neyman-Pearson version of hypothesis testing: pre-specified alternative hypotheses, power and sample size calculations, etc. Neyman and Pearson insist that hypothesis testing is about what to do, not what to believe. [1]

I assume Gigerenzer doesn’t take this analogy too seriously. In context, it’s a humorous interlude in his polemic against rote statistical ritual.

But there really is a conflict in hypothesis testing. Researchers naturally think in Bayesian terms, and interpret frequentist results as if they were Bayesian. They really do want probabilities associated with hypotheses, and will imagine they have them even though frequentist theory explicitly forbids this. The rest of the analogy, comparing the ego and superego to Fisher and Neyman-Pearson respectively, seems weaker to me. But I suppose you could imagine Neyman and Pearson playing the role of your conscience, making you feel guilty about the pragmatic but unprincipled use of p-values.

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[1] “No test based upon a theory of probability can by itself provide any valuable evidence of the truth or falsehood of a hypothesis. But we may look at the purpose of tests from another viewpoint. Without hoping to know whether each separate hypothesis is true or false, we may search for rules to govern behaviour in regard to them, in following which we insure that, in the long run of experience, we shall not often be wrong.”

Neyman J, Pearson E. On the problem of the most efficient tests of statistical hypotheses. Philos Trans Roy Soc A, 1933;231:289, 337.

The intersection of genomes is empty

From this story in Quanta Magazine:

In fact, there’s no single set of genes that all living things need in order to exist. When scientists first began searching for such a thing 20 years ago, they hoped that simply comparing the genome sequences from a bunch of different species would reveal an essential core shared by all species. But as the number of genome sequences blossomed, that essential core disappeared. In 2010, David Ussery, a biologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and his collaborators compared 1,000 genomes. They found that not a single gene is shared across all of life.

Continuum between anecdote and data

The difference between anecdotal evidence and data is overstated. People often have in mind this dividing line where observations on one side are worthless and observations on the other side are trustworthy. But there’s no such dividing line. Observations are data, but some observations are more valuable than others, and there’s a continuum of value.

Rib eye steak

I believe rib eye steaks are better for you than rat poison. My basis for that belief is anecdotal evidence. People who have eaten rib eye steaks have fared better than people who have eaten rat poison. I don’t have exact numbers on that, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. I have more confidence in that than in any clinical trial conclusion.

Hearsay evidence about food isn’t very valuable, per observation, but since millions of people have eaten steak for thousands of years, the cumulative weight of evidence is pretty good that steak is harmless if not good for you. The number of people who have eaten rat poison is much smaller, but given the large effect size, there’s ample reason to suspect that eating rat poison is a bad idea.

Now suppose you want to get more specific and determine whether rib eye steaks are good for you in particular. (I wouldn’t suggest trying rat poison.) Suppose you’ve noticed that you feel better after eating a steak. Is that an anecdote or data? What if you look back through your diary and noticed that every mention of eating steak lately has been followed by some remark about feeling better than usual. Is that data? What if you decide to flip a coin each day for the next month and eat steak if the coin comes up heads and tofu otherwise. Each of these steps is an improvement, but there’s no magical line you cross between anecdote and data.

Suppose you’re destructively testing the strength of concrete samples. There are better and worse ways to conduct such experiments, but each sample gives you valuable data. If you test 10 samples and they all withstand two tons of force per square inch, you have good reason to believe the concrete the samples were taken from can withstand such force. But if you test a drug on 10 patients, you can’t have the same confidence that the drug is effective. Human subjects are more complicated than concrete samples. Concrete samples aren’t subject to placebo effects. Also, cause and effect are more clear for concrete. If you apply a load and the sample breaks, you can assume the load caused the failure. If you treat a human for a disease and they recover, you can’t be as sure that the treatment caused the recovery. That doesn’t mean medical observations aren’t data.

Carefully collected observations in one area may be less statistically valuable than anecdotal observations in another. Observations are never ideal. There’s always some degree of bias, effects that can’t be controlled, etc. There’s no quantum leap between useless anecdotes and perfectly informative data. Some data are easy to draw inference from, but data that’s harder to understand doesn’t fail to be data.

Skin in the game for observational studies

The article Deming, data and observational studies by S. Stanley Young and Alan Karr opens with

Any claim coming from an observational study is most likely to be wrong.

They back up this assertion with data about observational studies later contradicted by prospective studies.

Much has been said lately about the assertion that most published results are false, particularly observational studies in medicine, and I won’t rehash that discussion here. Instead I want to cut to the process Young and Karr propose for improving the quality of observational studies. They summarize their proposal as follows.

The main technical idea is to split the data into two data sets, a modelling data set and a holdout data set. The main operational idea is to require the journal to accept or reject the paper based on an analysis of the modelling data set without knowing the results of applying the methods used for the modelling set on the holdout set and to publish an addendum to the paper giving the results of the analysis of the holdout set.

They then describe an eight-step process in detail. One step is that cleaning the data and dividing it into a modelling set and a holdout set would be done by different people than the modelling and analysis. They then explain why this would lead to more truthful publications.

The holdout set is the key. Both the author and the journal know there is a sword of Damocles over their heads. Both stand to be embarrassed if the holdout set does not support the original claims of the author.

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The full title of the article is Deming, data and observational studies: A process out of control and needing fixing. It appeared in the September 2011 issue of Significance.

Update: The article can be found here.

How did our ancestors sleep?

Electric lighting has changed the way we sleep, encouraging us to lose sleep by staying awake much longer after dark than we otherwise would.

Or maybe not. A new study of three contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes found that they stay awake long after dark and sleep an average of 6.5 hours a night. They also don’t nap much [1]. This suggests the way we sleep may not be that different from our ancient forebears.

Historian A. Roger Ekirch suggested that before electric lighting it was common to sleep in two four-hour segments with an hour or so of wakefulness in between. His theory was based primarily on medieval English texts that refer to “first sleep” and “second sleep” and has other literary support as well. A small study found that subjects settled into the sleep pattern Ekirch predicted when they were in a dark room for 14 hours each night for a month. But the hunter-gatherers don’t sleep this way.

Maybe latitude is an important factor. The hunter-gatherers mentioned above live between 2 and 20 degrees south of the equator whereas England is 52 degrees north of the equator. Maybe two-phase sleep was more common at high latitudes with long winter nights. Of course there are many differences between modern/ancient [2] hunter-gatherers and medieval Western Europeans besides latitude.

Two studies have found two patterns of how people sleep without electric lights. Maybe electric lights don’t have as much impact on how people sleep as other factors.

Related post: Paleolithic nonsense

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[1] The study participants were given something like a Fitbit to wear. The article said that naps less than 15 minutes would be below the resolution of the monitors, so we don’t know how often the participants took cat naps. We only know that they rarely took longer naps.

[2] There is an implicit assumption that the contemporary hunter-gatherers live and, in particular, sleep like their ancient ancestors. This seems reasonable, though we can’t be certain. There is also the bigger assumption that the tribesmen represent not only their ancestors but all paleolithic humans. Maybe they do, and we don’t have much else to go on, but we don’t know. I suspect there was more diversity in the paleolithic era than we assume.

The name we give to bright ideas

From The Book of Strange New Things:

… I said that if science could come up with something like the Jump it could surely solve a problem like that. Severin seized hold of that word, “science.” Science, he said, is not some mysterious larger-than-life force, it’s just the name we give to bright ideas that individual guys have when they’re lying in bed at night, and that if the fuel thing bothered me so much, there was nothing stopping me from having a bright idea to solve it …

Subway map of the solar system

This is a thumbnail version of a large, high-resolution image by Ulysse Carion. Thanks to Aleksey Shipilëv (@shipilev) for pointing it out.

It’s hard to see in the thumbnail, but the map gives the change in velocity needed at each branch point. You can find the full 2239 x 2725 pixel image here or click on the thumbnail above.

New development in cancer research scandal

My interest in the Anil Potti scandal started when my former colleagues could not reproduce the analysis in one of Potti’s papers. (Actually, they did reproduce the analysis, at great effort, in the sense of forensically determining the erroneous steps that were carried out.) Two years ago, the story was on 60 Minutes. The straw that broke the camel’s back was not bad science but résumé padding.

It looks like the story is a matter of fraud rather than sloppiness. This is unfortunate because sloppiness is much more pervasive than fraud, and this could have made a great case study of bad analysis. However, one could look at it as a case study in how good analysis (by the folks at MD Anderson) can uncover fraud.

Now there’s a new development in the Potti saga. The latest issue of The Cancer Letter contains letters by whistle-blower Bradford Perez who warned officials at Duke about problems with Potti’s research.

Go anywhere in the universe in two years

Here’s a totally impractical but fun back-of-the-envelope calculation from Bob Martin.

Suppose you have a space ship that could accelerate at 1 g for as long as you like. Inside the ship you would feel the same gravity as on earth. You could travel wherever you like by accelerating at 1 g for the first half of the flight then reversing acceleration for the second half of the flight. This approach could take you to Mars in three days.

If you could accelerate at 1 g for a year you could reach the speed of light, and travel half a light year. So you could reverse your acceleration and reach a destination a light year away in two years. But this ignores relativity. Once you’re traveling at near the speed of light, time practically stops for you, so you could keep going as far as you like without taking any more time from your perspective. So you could travel anywhere in the universe in two years!

Of course there are a few problems. We have no way to sustain such acceleration. Or to build a ship that could sustain an impact with a spec of dust when traveling at relativistic speed. And the calculation ignores relativity until it throws it in at the end. Still, it’s fun to think about.

Update: Dan Piponi gives a calculation on G+ that addresses the last of the problems I mentioned above, sticking relativity on to the end of a classical calculation. He does a proper relativistic calculation from the beginning.

If you take the radius of the observable universe to be 45 billion light years, then I think you need about 12.5 g to get anywhere in it in 2 years. (Both those quantities as measured in the frame of reference of the traveler.)

If you travel at constant acceleration a for time t then the distance covered is c^2/a (cosh(a t/c) – 1) (Note that gives the usual a t^2/2 for small t.)