Statistical significance in the era of big data
Mirosław Szreder · Wiadomości Statystyczne The Polish Statistician · 2019
The development of new technologies has affected both the procedures of traditional statistical surveys and the perception of their results in the light of other availa-ble sources of information. In this connection, the roleof the verification of statistical hypotheses and of the interpretation and presentation of its results, including the use of statistical significance and p-value, has recently returned as a frequent topic for discussion among the scientific community. The author was inspired to write this paper by a wave of discussion regarding this matter held at the beginning of 2019 in the Natureand The American Statistician journals. The aim of the paper is to present the opportunities provided and challenges posedby the use of big data to the hypothesis verification process and to statistical inference, both in the traditional and Bayesian approaches. The author explains the necessity of discontinuing adopting excessivesimplifications while performing statisticalinference and pre-senting the results of the verification of hypotheses. This involves both the postulate to pay greater attention tothe quality of sampling data, especially in the case of data originating from big data sets, as well as the postulate to providefull information about the statistical model on the basis of which the inference is being performed.