It corresponds to about a one-in-2million chance that your result is just noise*, which seems a bit excessive and sometimes makes statisticians snigger.
The shift to making statisticians an integral part of the research team rather than to be consulted in isolation will be challenging.
Assuming normality for error terms (a dreadful misnaming by statisticians: Nature doesn't make errors, statisticians do) is fine when valid, and then familiar big statistical theorems can apply.
Such stocks as Cisco Systems are what IPO dreams are made ofand what give statisticians fits.
But amid the glittering career numbers that would make a statistician swoon — 1,242 receptions for 14,268 yards and 103 touchdowns — one protrudes like a rotten apple in a bushel full of Red Delicious: zero.
The potential "subjectivity" of these priors have made some statisticians and clinicians concerned about the use of this method.
This is a rare event, so the statisticians make no special adjustment for it.
For example, many economists suspect that the growth in America's GDP, and hence its labour productivity, is overstated relative to Europe's because American statisticians make a much bigger adjustment for improvements in the quality of goods, notably computers.
Survey statisticians make use of auxiliary information to improve estimates, for example in calibration estimation, introduced in Deville and Särndal (1992), which is used to obtain new weights that are close to the basic design weights and that, at the same time, comply with benchmark constraints on the auxiliary information available.
"The only way to be the greatest pure hitter in baseball history is to have a statistician make the argument for you," Schell told me.
