Improving Your Statistical Inference

This course aims to help you to draw better statistical inferences from empirical research. Students discuss how to correctly interpret p-values, effect sizes, confidence intervals, Bayes Factors, and likelihood ratios, and how these statistics answer different questions you might be interested in. Then, they learn how to design experiments where the false positive rate is controlled, and how to decide upon the sample size for a study, for example in order to achieve high statistical power. Subsequently, students learn how to interpret evidence in the scientific literature given widespread publication bias, for example by learning about p-curve analysis. Finally, the course discusses how to do philosophy of science, theory construction, and cumulative science, including how to perform replication studies, why and how to pre-register an experiment, and how to share results following Open Science principles.