You are invited to a special public lecture: ‘Are most research findings really false?’ by Professor Yoav Benjamini.
Abstract: In recent years there has been a growing concern that important findings reported in leading scientific journals could not be replicated, leading to the question in the title. Many financial and sociological causes have been suggested to explain this worrisome situation. I shall demonstrate and explain the replicability problem and the causes being offered, but argue that behind the scene lies a simple statistical cause. I shall describe how the emergence of the statistical problem is related to the recent changes in the way scientific research is conducted.
Yoav Benjamini is the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Tel Aviv University. His paper (Y. Benjamini and Y. Hochberg (1995) Controlling the False Discovery Rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, 57, 289-300) on false discovery rate (FDA) is one of the most cited papers in statistics ever, with about 14,000 citations. It has generated huge impacts across the whole spectrum of sciences. He was awarded the 2012 Israel Prize in statistics, the highest honor handed out by the State of Israel.
Date: Wednesday 10 July
Time: 5.30pm
Location: Room 1015, building 32