مقدار به عنوان معياري براي پشتيباني فرض ها: محاسن و معايب -P

P-Value as a Support Measurement for Hypothesis Testing: What They Are and What They Are Not

P-values (or significance probabilities) have been used in place of hypothesis tests as a means of giving more information about the relationship between the data and the hypothesis than does a simple reject/do not reject decision. Virtually all elementary statistics texts cover the calculation of P-values for one-sided and point-null hypotheses concerning the mean of a sample from a normal distribution there is, however, a third case that is intermediate to the one-sided and point-null cases, namely the interval hypothesis, that receives no coverage in elementary texts. We show that P-values are continuous functions of the hypothesis for fixed data. This allows a unified treatment of all three types of hypothesis testing problems. It also lead to the discovery that a common informal use of P-values as measures of support or evidence for hypotheses has serious logical flaws.