We argued recently that the positive predictive value (PPV) and the negative predictive value (NPV) are valuable metrics to include during null hypothesis significance testing: They inform the researcher about the probability of statistically significant and non-significant test outcomes actually being true. Although commonly misunderstood, a reported p value estimates only the probability of o...

Background Quantitative Sensory Testing (QST) has been used in clinical and experimental settings to establish sensory assessment for different types of pains, and may be a useful tool for the assessment of orofacial pain, but this premise needs to be tested. Objective The aim of the study was to evaluate responses to thermal stimuli between painful and non-painful facial sites in subjects wi...

MOTIVATION Gene expression experiments provide a fast and systematic way to identify disease markers relevant to clinical care. In this study, we address the problem of robust identification of differentially expressed genes from microarray data. Differentially expressed genes, or discriminator genes, are genes with significantly different expression in two user-defined groups of microarray exp...

Background Nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain-containing protein 2 (NOD2) may play an important role in the outcome of kidney cancer patients. To explore the relationship between NOD2 and the prognosis of kidney cancer patients, a databank-based reanalysis was conducted. Materials and Methods Data related to kidney cancer patients at least with survival information, was obtained mainly...

Often a statistical test is performed in which the observed outcome favors the alternative but the evidence in favor of the alternative is not statistically significant. Suppose that, for example, a researcher tests the hypothesis that the mean is 10 versus the alternative is less than 10 using a z-test. Suppose further that based on a sample of size 8, the p-value is 0.078 (hence the null hypo...

BACKGROUND The prevalence of anxiety/depression is quite high during the perinatal period but unfortunately its detection and treatment have been less than satisfactory. Moreover, many women are reluctant to take pharmacotherapy for fear of excretion of drugs into their breast milk. This study assesses the effectiveness of counseling from minimally trained community health workers in reducing a...

MOTIVATION Microarray data typically have small numbers of observations per gene, which can result in low power for statistical tests. Test statistics that borrow information from data across all of the genes can improve power, but these statistics have non-standard distributions, and their significance must be assessed using permutation analysis. When sample sizes are small, the number of dist...