Topic summary
P-values
Extracted from the Wikipedia article P-value.
Misuse
Some statisticians have proposed abandoning p-values and focusing more on other inferential statistics, such as confidence intervals, likelihood ratios, or Bayes factors, but there is heated debate on the feasibility of these alternatives. At the same time, the use of p-values has also been defended as a useful statistical tool that should not be abandoned. Others have suggested to remove fixed significance thresholds and to interpret p-values as continuous indices of the strength of evidence against the null hypothesis, although these proposals in themselves have been criticized. Yet others suggested to report alongside p-values the prior probability of a real effect that would be required to obtain a false positive risk (i.e. the probability that there is no real effect) below a pre-specified threshold (e.g. 5%).