What kind of stats game do you play?

Quick post today. 

Anyone who reads medical literature on the regular has seen “p” values. We have a basic understanding of the statistics used (I’m totally referring to myself; I have relearned statistics in a short-term form for almost every board exam I’ve ever taken).

It wasn’t until I started the deep dive into medical diagnosis and the fits and foibles thereof that I learned about Bayes theorem.

Here’s an easy link. 

https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/22

The easy link looks a lot nicer than the actual equation. 

https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/87c061fe1c7430a5201eef3fa50f9d00eac78810

Basically,  the frequentist says “common things are common”.  “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses”. 

The Bayesian says, “ I hear hoofbeats. It must be horses”, but then looks out the window and says “but I see black and white stripes on those horses. Sooo, maybe those hoofbeats are zebras”. Bayesians update the hypothesis based on the new data collected. 

I wonder if there are many truly excellent diagnosticians out there who are Bayesians, and don’t even know it. 

I also wonder how often we miss the diagnosis in front of us because of frequentism.

Thanks for reading and considering. More to come. Peace.