Talk to the Veterans Crisis Line now
U.S. flag
An official website of the United States government
Veterans Benefits and Health Care About VA Find a VA Location

VA Health Systems Research

Go to the VA ORD website
Go to the QUERI website

Cyberseminar Registration

Cyberseminars
Cyberseminar Series VA Statisticians' Association
Session Title Interpretation of P-values: Challenges for the Replication and Comparison of Statistical Results
Large-scale genome-wide association studies rely on extremely small p-values, on the order of 10-8, to achieve positive findings. Little attention has been given to the implications of this shift from the traditional 0.05 significance level on the likely success of such studies. In this seminar, we address unappreciated properties of extreme p-values that may contribute to the failure to replicate many findings from genome-wide association studies. Specifically, we address the following questions. (1) How variable is the sampling distribution of a p-value? (2) Given a SNP with a specific, observed p-value, what is likely to happen for the same SNP in an independent replication study? (3) Given two observed p-values for different SNPs from the same or different studies, how certain can we be that the effect of one SNP is greater than the effect of the other? We obtain explicit numerical results showing that even extremely small p-values provide surprisingly little information as to the likelihood of subsequent replication or the relative importance of the underlying associations. While we frame our findings in terms of GWAS and SNPs, they are valid for p-values produced by most large-sample statistical tests applied to any number of hypothesis tests. Our results suggest that unjustified over-interpretation of very small initial p¬-values are an important factor contributing to the frequency of subsequent non-replications. The target audience would be mostly statisticians and researchers who work with data, especially those working with high-dimensional or genetic data. The level is not basic, but somewhat advanced. VASA Website: http://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/for_researchers/sig/vasa/
Date 10/29/2013
Time 2:00pm-3:00pm ET
Presenters
 Name  About the presenter
Ilana Belitskaya-Levy, PhD
Cooperative Studies Program Coordinating Center, VA Palo Alto, Greater Los Angeles Healthcaer System
Presenting: Interpretation of P-values: Challenges for the Replication and Comparison of Statistical Results

Registration Information
*
*
*
Are you affiliated with the VA?*
*Required Question to complete registration

Your email address and personal information will be used by the Webinar organizer to communicate with you about this event and their other services. To review the Webinar organizer's privacy policy or opt out of their other communications, contact the Webinar organizer directly. For general questions, contact the HSR&D Cyberseminar team.

     


Questions about the HSR website? Email the Web Team

Any health information on this website is strictly for informational purposes and is not intended as medical advice. It should not be used to diagnose or treat any condition.