Forking paths problem

Fallacy in statistical hypothesis testing

The garden of forking paths is a problem in frequentist hypothesis testing through which researchers can unintentionally produce false positives for a tested hypothesis, through leaving themselves too many degrees of freedom. In contrast to fishing expeditions such as data dredging where only expected or apparently-significant results are published, this allows for a similar effect even when only one experiment is run, through a series of choices about how to implement methods and analyses, which are themselves informed by the data as it is observed and processed.

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