Posts Tagged ‘analytical methods’

Torturing Observational Data to Get a Confession – A Case Study

May 6, 2024 — Sometime in the 1960s, economist Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate, advised colleagues that torturing a set of data can always yield a confession to serve the purpose at hand. As if to prove this adage, a new publication in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology shows us 1,208 ways to analyze NHANES data on all-cause mortality […]

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“We Should Avoid Treating Published Research as Fact”

November 2, 2023 — Over the past 20 years or so, there has been growing concern that many research results published in scientific journals can’t be reproduced. Depending on the field of research, studies have found efforts to redo published studies lead to different results in between 23% and 89% of cases. To understand how different researchers might arrive […]