Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The preliminary findings clearly called for an examination of surgical
procedures and of patient characteristics that might help forecast successful
surgery. But the generation of a
p
value and the drawing of any final con-
clusions had to wait on clinical trials specifically designed for that purpose.
This doesn't mean that one should not report anomalies and other unex-
pected findings. Rather, one should not attempt to provide
p
values or
confidence intervals in support of them. Successful researchers engage in a
cycle of theorizing and experimentation so that the results of one experi-
ment become the basis for the hypotheses tested in the next.
A related, extremely common error whose resolution we discuss at
length in Chapters 10 and 11 is to use the same data to select variables for
inclusion in a model and to assess their significance. Successful model
builders develop their frameworks in a series of stages, validating each
model against a second independent data set before drawing conclusions.
