[Rd] Regression stars

[Ravi Varadhan]

They are "reaching for the stars".  Pardon my jest, but I couldn't resist. 

Ravi

-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Uwe Ligges
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:01 AM
To: Frank Harrell
Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] Regression stars



On 12.02.2013 15:42, Frank Harrell wrote:
> Uwe I've been consulting for decades and have never once been asked 
> for such stars.

Honestly: last time I have been asked last week.

And when I answered (in another case few months ago) "OK, I can add you another 5 stars for p values smaller than 0.5" they did not find it too funny.

Best,
Uwe

> And when a clinical researcher puts a sentence in a study protocol 
> that P<0.05 will be considered "significant" I get them to take it out.
>
> Frank
>
> Uwe Ligges-3 wrote
>> On 12.02.2013 14:54, Ben Bolker wrote:
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>> <murdoch.duncan <at>
>>   gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>     [snip]
>>>>
>>>> Regarding stringsAsFactors:  I'm not going to defend keeping it as 
>>>> is, I'll let the people who like it defend it.
>>>
>>>     Would someone (anyone) like to come forward and give us a 
>>> defense of stringsAsFactors=TRUE -- even someone who doesn't 
>>> personally like it but would like to play devil's advocate?
>>
>> Sure:
>> I will have to change all my scripts, my teaching examples, my book, 
>> and lots of code examples for research and particularly consulting jobs.
>>
>> Personally, I think having stringsAsFactors=TRUE is not too bad for
>> read.table() but less useful for data.frame().
>>
>> And since you ask for the devil's advocate already, related to the 
>> subject line: Removing stars is horrible for consulting: With all 
>> those people from biology, medicine and other fields who even ask us 
>> questions in term of significance stars that are obviously very common for them.
>> Many of them will certainly ask us for the stars, and ask us to 
>> switch to another software product once they do not get it from R. 
>> They may not be interested in being taught about the advantages or 
>> disadvantages of p-values or stars.
>>
>> There are different use cases of R, and I want to keep stars for 
>> consulting tasks where things have to be delivered within minutes. I 
>> am happy with or without for teaching, where I have the time and can 
>> easily talk about the sense and nonsense of p-values.
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Uwe
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> What I will likely do is
>>>> make a few changes so that character vectors are automatically 
>>>> changed to factors in modelling functions, so that operating with 
>>>> stringsAsFactors=FALSE doesn't trigger silly warnings.
>>>>
>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>
>>>
>>>    [apologies for snipping context: "gmane made me do it"]
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>>
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>
>
>
>
> -----
> Frank Harrell
> Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Regression-stars-tp4657795p4658268.html
> Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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