When
Problems in Complex Disease Biology
You heard it over and over again during our previous lectures: big data genetics needs statistics to understand results and put them into perspective. The same, albeit to a more temperate degree, is true for the findings we obtain in our daily small-scale, wet-lab experiments. Statistical significance rules. But have you ever wondered about the conceptual significance of the statistical tests you are expected to perform, and the P values these tests "have" to reach for a result to be worth publishing? P values dominate much of our scientific life and often determine whether a study comes across as a success or a failure... yet, as our next speaker, Dean Billheimer, will show us, the significance and interpretation of P values and the probabilities they convey are NOT univocal... far from being a source of certainties and etched-in-stone truths, statistical analyses and probabilities also need to be contextualized - and with great caution ....