论文标题
可视化可以减轻二分的思维吗?视觉表示对悬崖效果的影响
Can visualization alleviate dichotomous thinking? Effects of visual representations on the cliff effect
论文作者
论文摘要
据报道,诸如P值和置信区间(CI)等科学文章中的统计结果的常见报告样式易于对二分法进行解释,尤其是在无效假设显着性测试框架方面。例如,当p值足够小,或者是研究药物和安慰剂的平均效应的顺式不重叠时,科学家倾向于声称显着差异,而经常忽略效果大小的大小和绝对差异。这种推理已被证明可能对科学有害。建议使用依赖证据强度的视觉估计的技术来减少这种二分法的解释,但它们的有效性也受到了挑战。我们对具有统计分析专业知识的研究人员进行了两个实验,以比较置信区间的几种替代表示,并使用贝叶斯多级模型来估计表示样式对研究人员对结果的主观信心差异的影响。我们还询问了受访者在表示风格中的意见和偏好。我们的结果表明,将视觉信息添加到经典的CI表示中可以减少二分解释的趋势 - 与经典的CI可视化和p值的经典CI可视化和CI相比,p值为0.05的置信度突然下降。所有数据和分析均可在https://github.com/helske/statvis上公开获取。
Common reporting styles for statistical results in scientific articles, such as p-values and confidence intervals (CI), have been reported to be prone to dichotomous interpretations, especially with respect to the null hypothesis significance testing framework. For example when the p-value is small enough or the CIs of the mean effects of a studied drug and a placebo are not overlapping, scientists tend to claim significant differences while often disregarding the magnitudes and absolute differences in the effect sizes. This type of reasoning has been shown to be potentially harmful to science. Techniques relying on the visual estimation of the strength of evidence have been recommended to reduce such dichotomous interpretations but their effectiveness has also been challenged. We ran two experiments on researchers with expertise in statistical analysis to compare several alternative representations of confidence intervals and used Bayesian multilevel models to estimate the effects of the representation styles on differences in researchers' subjective confidence in the results. We also asked the respondents' opinions and preferences in representation styles. Our results suggest that adding visual information to classic CI representation can decrease the tendency towards dichotomous interpretations - measured as the `cliff effect': the sudden drop in confidence around p-value 0.05 - compared with classic CI visualization and textual representation of the CI with p-values. All data and analyses are publicly available at https://github.com/helske/statvis.