# Trick: eyeballing

Eyeballing your data means to look into your data by eye and figure out where the interesting parts are. The idea is that you then run your statistical analyses only on the interesting parts. If the interesting parts form only ten percent of the data, this trick leads to a large probability of finding a p-value below 0.05 somewhere if the null hypothesis is true:

1 - 0.95 ^ 10
## [1] 0.4013

This value (in Neyman–Pearson terms the “Type-I error rate”, though that term shouldn’t strictly be used outside of behavioral decision making) should have stayed at 0.05 or below (because that’s what you promise the reader by saying you take 0.05 as a criterion), but it is 8 times greater, i.e. your p-values have been illegally been improved by a factor of 8. You should therefore lower your significance threshold to 0.005 or so.

Statisticians of all convictions agree on the problematicity of eyeballing, though many researchers overlook it. To read an argument from the literature about this, consult page 633 by Wagenmakers et al. (2012).

### How not to eyeball

The solution is: establish your precise analysis procedure before looking at your data, and make that analysis procedure nonselective (e.g. it should not look for the highest peak in the EEG). Your analysis procedure should take into account all possible parts of the data, and correct for multiple possibilities of finding low p-values.

An example is on page 6 by Wanrooij et al. (2014a).

# .

Instead of “control of the Type-I error rate” we should probably have said “the need for keeping the probability of finding p<0.05 somewhere at 0.05 if the null hypothesis is true.” This is because it is strange to talk about Type-I error rates if we don’t also talk about Type-II error rates (and we don’t want to talk about Type-II error rates because we don’t want to accept null hypotheses in a paper that reports inferential p-values instead of being oriented at behavioral decisions). Nevertheless, even with the strictly correct alternative formulation most readers would have thought “aha, control of the Type-I error rate” anyway.

And if you look farther on page 6, we even say: “To compensate for the double chance of finding results (separate QS and non-QS analyses) all tests employ a conservative α level of 0.025.” This nicely corrects for multiple testing (sleeping and non-sleeping babies), but strictly speaking again has inappropriate Neyman–Pearson jargon. We should have said “all tests employ a significance criterion of 0.025.”

# .

Binning! We should probably have divised a way to take account of the continuousness of the “window location” factor instead of arbitrarily using 8 bins. We decided against this because it is much more difficult to incorporate function-matching methods into an analysis of variance than yesterday’s example (replacing a χ2-test with logistic regression) was.

# .

The “hindsight bias”. All decisions look perfectly reasonable, but:

1. Would we have followed the conservative procedure of looking at all windows if our final p-value (of 0.016) had not been below 0.05?

2. Would we have set the significance criterion to 0.025 if our final p-value had been 0.04 instead of 0.016?

# .

Wagenmakers et al.’s solution to this general problem is to establish the entire analysis procedure in advance, by preregistration of the complete method (page 634).

Wagenmakers et al. mention the problem that sometimes you or your reviewers would still like to include analyses that you had not planned. Their solution is to then add a section “Exploratory results” to your paper. For an example, look at page 6 and Figure 4 by Wanrooij et al. (2014a). Figure 4 reanalyzes the data in group-to-group comparisons, so this is in addition to the original analysis of variance, hence exploratory; no conclusions can be based on such findings, but they may inform future confirmatory research.

# Another legitimate procedure for optional stopping

Yesterday we saw that using a repeated significance criterion of 0.01 allows you to stop your experiment after every participant, leaving you with an α of 0.05 or less. The problem with it was that it had to be done in the context of behavioral decision making, such as deciding whether a drug could go to market or not.

On page 636, Wagenmakers et al. show another procedure that allows optional stopping, namely with Bayes factors (Rolf Zwaan’s blog, discussed yesterday, also mentioned that).

# Bayesian statistics

Some historical development in statistical theory:

• 1778 Bayesian statistics (Pierre-Simon Laplace)
• 1900 invention of the p-value by Karl Pearson
• 1920+ popularization of p-value testing by Ronald Fisher, against Bayesian statistics
• 1933 frequentist statistics by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson ($$\alpha$$, $$\beta$$)
• 1960+ reassessment of Bayesian methods (Harold Jeffreys)

### What can Bayesian statistics do for you?

• Some people find it better for everything, though Simmons et al. (2011) recommended caution.
• While pre-writing allows you to publish a paper whose main result is a none-result, Bayesian statistics allows you to publish a paper that actually argues for the null hypothesis.

### The p-value approach

The p-value approach is based on computing the probability of the observed data, as well as non-observed data, under the null hypothesis.

$P (\text{observed or more distant data} \mid H_0)$

x <- seq (from = -30, to = +30, by = 0.1)
y <- dnorm (x, mean = 0, sd = 8)
plot (x, y, type = "l",
xlab = "effect", ylab = "probability density",
ylim = c(-0.005, 0.06))
lines (c(-30, 30), c(0, 0))
lines (c(0, 0), c(0, 0.052))
text (x = 0, y = 0.052, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "null hypothesis")
lines (c(13.5, 13.5), c(0, 0.03))
lines (c(-13.5, -13.5), c(0, 0.03))
text (x = 13.5, y = 0.03, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "observed mean")

If the standard deviation is known to be 8.0, and the observed mean is 13.5, the p-value is the area under the curve to the right of 13.5, plus the (same) area under the curve to the left of -13.5:

2 * pnorm (13.5, mean = 0.0, sd = 8.0, lower.tail = FALSE)
## [1] 0.09151

### The likelihood ratio approach

Suppose you have two hypotheses, H0 and H1, and you want to pit them against each other. There is no need for p-value testing, and even no need to compute probability areas of data you have not observed.

For instance, if H0 is still your null hypothesis (as the name suggests), and H1 posits that the Flemish are better than the Dutch by 20 along the scale, then H1 is twice as likely as H0:

x <- seq (from = -30, to = +30, by = 0.1)
h0 = 0
h1 = 20
y0 <- dnorm (x, mean = h0, sd = 8)
y1 <- dnorm (x, mean = h1, sd = 8)
plot (x, y0, type = "l",
xlab = "effect", ylab = "probability density",
ylim = c(-0.005, 0.06))
lines (x, y1)
lines (c(-30, 30), c(0, 0))
lines (c(h0, h0), c(0, 0.052))
lines (c(h1, h1), c(0, 0.052))
text (x = h0, y = 0.052, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "H0")
text (x = h1, y = 0.052, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "H1")
lines (c(13.5, 13.5), c(0, 0.052))
text (x = 13.5, y = 0.052, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "m")

dnorm (13.5, mean=20, sd=8) /dnorm (13.5, mean=0, sd=8)
## [1] 2.985

So the observed data are almost 3 times as likely under H1 than under H0.

The likelihood ratio of the data with respect to these two hypotheses is therefore given by

$\frac { P (data \mid H_1) }{ P (data \mid H_0) }$

I here stop talking about likelihood ratios; for today they are just an ingredient for Bayesian reasoning.

### The Bayesian approach

Bayesians do not want to know probabilities of the data given any hypothesis, but they want to know the “probability” that a hypothesis is true, i.e. they want to know what odds they can gamble for!

So Bayesians take seriously the existence of a probability of a hypothesis, given observed data:

$P (H_0 \mid data)\ \ \ \text{and}\ \ \ P (H_1 \mid data)$

From high-school probability theory, you will remember the formula for conjoint probabilities:

$P (A\ \text{and}\ B) = P (A \mid B)\ P (B)$

and therefore also

$P (B\ \text{and}\ A) = P (B \mid A)\ P (A)$

Since

$P (A\ \text{and}\ B) = P (B\ \text{and}\ A)$

we have

$P (A \mid B)\ P (B) = P (B \mid A)\ P (A)$

or

$P (A \mid B) = \frac {P (B \mid A)\ P (A)} {P (B)}$

which is Bayes’ formula.

In Bayesian statistics we apply this to data and hypotheses:

$P (H \mid data) = \frac {P (data \mid H)\ P (H)} {P (data)}$

where $$P (data \mid H)$$ is something that we can compute (a “real” probability), $$P(H)$$ is the “prior” probability that a hypothesis is true (this one is tricky, see below!), and $$P(data)$$ is the probability of observing the data in the world, which is a factor that will typically vanish once we try to compute interesting things.

It is easier to work with odds than with probabilities. In the Dutch–Flemish case, we want to know how the two hypotheses (a true effect of 0 versus a true effect of 20) compare to each other, i.e. we want to the odds of H1 versus H0, given the data:

$\text{evidence in favour of} \ H_1 = \frac {P(H_1\mid data)}{P(H_0\mid data)}$

and, equivalently, the golden grail of arguing for the null hypothesis:

$\text{evidence in favour of} \ H_0 = \frac {P(H_0\mid data)}{P(H_1\mid data)}$

And we can compute these odds:

$\frac {P(H_1\mid data)}{P(H_0\mid data)} = \frac {P(data\mid H_1)}{P(data\mid H_0)} \frac {P(H_1)}{P(H_0)}$

and indeed, $$P(data)$$ dropped out. The first factor is simply the likelihood ratio, and the second factor is the prior odds in favour of $$H_1$$, i.e. the extent to which you, as a researcher, believed in $$H_1$$ versus $$H_0$$ before running the experiment.

And oops, that sounds very subjective!

This subjectivity is the reason why Fisher rejected Bayesian statistics in the 1920s. Nowadays, however, Jeffreys and others have proposed more objective kinds of priors (and less stupid alternative hypotheses than $$H_1 = 20$$), and Bayesian statistics has become more popular again.

Anyway, let’s see how the Dutch–Flemish experiment would fare with Bayesian researchers. Imagine that there is a Dutch researcher who proposes that the difference between the Dutch and Flemish population means on this German-language proficiency task is 0, and that there is a Flemish researcher who proposes that the difference is 20 in favour of the Flemish population. Suppose also that these two researchers agree in advance that an impartial judge would probably consider the two hypotheses equally likely, so that

$\frac {P(H_1)}{P(H_0)} = 1$

before the experiment. The two researchers agree that they will start to believe in the other researcher’s hypothesis once the odds in favour of that hypothesis change by a factor of 100 on the basis of observed data. That is, the Dutch researcher will believe $$H_1$$ as soon as

$\frac {P(H_1 \mid data)}{P(H_0 \mid data)} = 100$

and the Flemish researcher will believe $$H_0$$ as soon as

$\frac {P(H_1 \mid data)}{P(H_0 \mid data)} = 0.01$

After the experiment, however, the odds have increased in favour of $$H_1$$, but only by a factor 2.985 (the likelihood ratio mentioned above):

$\frac {P(H_1\mid exp1)}{P(H_0\mid exp1)} = \frac {P(exp1\mid H_1)}{P(exp1\mid H_0)} \frac {P(H_1)}{P(H_0)} = 2.985 \cdot 1 = 2.985$

So the odds are now 3 to 1 in favour of $$H_1$$. Not decisive. The researchers decide to do a second experiment, which in itself gives an odds of 2 to 1 in favour of $$H_1$$. As the prior odds before this second experiment are 3 to 1, the odds after the second experiment are now 6 to 1 in favour of $$H_1$$:

$\frac {P(H_1\mid exp1,2)}{P(H_0\mid exp1,2)} = \frac {P(exp2\mid H_1)}{P(exp2\mid H_0)} \frac {P(H_1\mid exp1)}{P(H_0 \mid exp1)} = 2 \cdot 3 = 6$

Next, they run a third experiment, which gives an odds of 1.5 in favour of the Dutch. The odds in favour of $$H_1$$ reduce to 4:

$\frac {P(H_1\mid exp1,2,3)}{P(H_0\mid exp1,2,3)} = \frac {P(exp3\mid H_1)}{P(exp3\mid H_0)} \frac {P(H_1\mid exp1,2)}{P(H_0 \mid exp1,2)} = 6 \cdot 1/1.5 = 4$

Next, the fourth experiment yields an odds of 40 in favour of the Flemish, so that the total odds become 160 in favour of $$H_1$$. At this time, both researchers agree that $$H_0$$ is rejected and $$H_1$$ is supported. They conclude together that the Flemish population is better on this task than the Dutch population (on average).

In general, this method can lead to acceptance of $$H_0$$ just as easily as to acceptance of $$H_1$$, a situation not possible with Fisheran statistics.

### How Bayesian statistics is really done

This example had some silly aspects, such as that $$H_1$$ was a point hypothesis. In general $$H_1$$ is taken as something like “everything beside $$H_0$$, with some emphasis on not-so-distant hypotheses”, i.e. $$H_1$$ is a collection of weighted points:

x <- seq (from = -10, to = +10, by = 0.01)
y <- 1 / pi / (1 + x^2)
plot (x, y, type = "l",
xlab = "effect", ylab = "probability density",
ylim = c(-0.005, 0.4))
lines (c(-10, 10), c(0, 0))
lines (c(0, 0), c(0, 0.052))
text (x = 0, y = 0.052, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "H0")
text (x = 1, y = 0.25, pos = 3, offset = 0.6,
labels = "H1")

The mathematics becomes more involved, because we have to average over multiple hypotheses.

Another silly aspect was that our computations assumed that the standard deviation was known. In reality it isn’t, so we have to use “non-central t distributions” rather than Gaussian distributions, and these are mentioned in some of the papers you may have seen.

# A paper with a null hypothesis!

On pages 15–19 by Wanrooij et al. (2015) we perform a Bayesian analysis after having seen that the null hypothesis could not be rejected.