Many researchers worry about violations of the proportional hazards assumption when comparing treatments in a randomized study. Besides the fact that this frequently makes them turn to a much worse approach, the harm done by violations of the proportional odds assumption usually do not prevent the proportional odds model from providing a reasonable treatment effect assessment.
This article discusses issues related to alpha spending, effect sizes used in power calculations, multiple endpoints in RCTs, and endpoint labeling. Changes in endpoint priority is addressed. Included in the the discussion is how Bayesian probabilities more naturally allow one to answer multiple questions without all-too-arbitrary designations of endpoints as "primary" and "secondary". And we should not quit trying to learn.
To avoid "false positives" do away with "positive".
A good poker player plays the odds by thinking to herself "The probability I can win with this hand is 0.91" and not "
Misinterpretation of P-values and Main Study Results Dichotomania Problems With Change Scores Improper Subgrouping Serial Data and Response Trajectories Cluster Analysis As Doug Altman famously wrote in his Scandal of Poor Medical Research in BMJ in 1994, the quality of how statistical principles and analysis methods are applied in medical research is quite poor.
The difference between Bayesian and frequentist inference in a nutshell:
With Bayes you start with a prior distribution for θ and given your data make an inference about the θ-driven process generating your data (whatever that process happened to be), to quantify evidence for every possible value of θ.
With the many problems that p-values have, and the temptation to "bless" research when the p-value falls below an arbitrary threshold such as 0.05 or 0.005, researchers using p-values should at least be fully aware of what they are getting.
In trying to guard against false conclusions, researchers often attempt to minimize the risk of a “false positive” conclusion. In the field of assessing the efficacy of medical and behavioral treatments for improving subjects’ outcomes, falsely concluding that a treatment is effective when it is not is an important consideration.
Much has been written about problems with our most-used statistical paradigm: frequentist null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), p-values, type I and type II errors, and confidence intervals. Rejection of straw-man null hypotheses leads researchers to believe that their theories are supported, and the unquestioning use of a threshold such as p<0.