Confirming the Null: Remarks on Equivalence Testing and the Topology of Confirmation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Dale, Reid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Dale, Reid
author_facet Dale, Reid
contents Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing is a dominant framework for conducting statistical analysis across the sciences. There remains considerable debate as to whether, and under what circumstances, evidence can be said to be confirmatory of a null hypothesis. This paper presents a modal logic of short-run frequentist confirmation developed by leveraging the duality between hypothesis testing and statistical estimation. It is shown that a hypothesis is confirmable if and only if it satisfies the topological condition of having nonempty interior. Consequently, two-sided hypotheses are not statistically confirmable owing to defects in their topological structure. Equivalence hypotheses are, by contrast, confirmable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Confirming the Null: Remarks on Equivalence Testing and the Topology of Confirmation
Dale, Reid
Statistics Theory
Logic
Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing is a dominant framework for conducting statistical analysis across the sciences. There remains considerable debate as to whether, and under what circumstances, evidence can be said to be confirmatory of a null hypothesis. This paper presents a modal logic of short-run frequentist confirmation developed by leveraging the duality between hypothesis testing and statistical estimation. It is shown that a hypothesis is confirmable if and only if it satisfies the topological condition of having nonempty interior. Consequently, two-sided hypotheses are not statistically confirmable owing to defects in their topological structure. Equivalence hypotheses are, by contrast, confirmable.
title Confirming the Null: Remarks on Equivalence Testing and the Topology of Confirmation
topic Statistics Theory
Logic
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16331