# GLM vs. t-tests vs. non-parametric tests if all we care about is NHST

A skeleton simulation of different strategies for NHST for count data if all we care about is a p-value, as in bench biology where p-values are used to simply give one confidence that something didn’t go terribly wrong (similar to doing experiments in triplicate – it’s not the effect size that matters only “we have experimental evidence of a replicatable effect”) load libraries library(ggplot2) library(MASS) library(data.table) do_sim <- function(){ set.seed(1) niter <- 1000 methods <- c("t", "Welch", "log", "Wilcoxan", "nb") p_table <- matrix(NA, nrow=niter, ncol=length(methods)) colnames(p_table) <- methods res_table <- data.

# On alpha

This post is motivated by Terry McGlynn’s thought provoking How do we move beyond an arbitrary statistical threshold? I have been struggling with the ideas explored in Terry’s post ever since starting my PhD 30 years ago, and its only been in the last couple of years that my own thoughts have begun to gel. This long marination period is largely because of my very classical biostatistical training. My PhD is from the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook but the content was geometric morphometrics and James Rohlf was my mentor for morphometrics specifically, and multivariate statistics more generally.

#### R doodles. Some ecology. Some physiology. Much fake data.

Thoughts on R, statistical best practices, and teaching applied statistics to Biology majors

Jeff Walker, Professor of Biological Sciences

University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, United States