Blog

Welcome to the blog! Here you’ll find discussions on statistical science, methodology, and applications of statistical methods in research and practice.

Browse by Topic

Statistical Inference - Foundations of statistical reasoning
Sensitivity Analysis - Exploring assumption impacts
Data Management - Best practices for statistical workflows
Statistical Workflow - Reproducible research methods

All Posts

When Can We Say That Something Doesn’t Work?

statistics

When are we allowed to conclude that an intervention doesn’t work? Is it when a study or several studies fail to find significant differences?

17 min

How Useful Is Nutritional Epidemiology?

nutrition

The studies that gain the most attention from the media are usually nutritional epidemiological studies. However, there is a good reason to be skeptical of these types of studies and in this blog post, I explain why.

20 min

Multi-Language Code Examples

statistics

programming

tutorial

Examples of using Stata, Julia, and pseudocode in blog posts

Jan 6, 2026

5 min

A Critical Look At The REDUCE-IT Trial

medicine

The results of the long-awaited REDUCE-IT trial are finally out in The New

Jan 6, 2026

13 min

Seductive Surrogates Can Be Deadly

medicine

A post explaining what surrogate markers are, why we sometimes focus on

Jan 6, 2026

5 min

How Did We Figure Out Smoking Causes Lung Cancer?

medicine

A relatively simple way to conclude a cause and effect relationship in humans is with

Jan 6, 2026

6 min

The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Fish Oil?

medicine

A look at fish oil’s controversial evidence base and how a recently completed

Jan 6, 2026

9 min

Revisiting Eggs and Dietary Cholesterol

nutrition

A look at the recent JAMA study that found an association between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular disease incidence along with a look at the current state of research on this question.

Jan 6, 2026

23 min

Confidence, Posteriors, and the Bootstrap

statistics

This guide discusses the bootstrap resampling method and its close connection to the consonance distribution and how to use certain iterations of the bootstrap to construct a consonance distribution.

Jan 12, 2025

10 min

Computing Confidence Interval Functions with cifunction

statistics

stata

confidence intervals

data visualization

statistical methods

Learn how to compute and visualize confidence interval functions (confidence curves, p-value functions) using the cifunction Stata package. Includes practical examples and implementation guide.

Mar 23, 2024

10 min

Your Models Are Neither Useful Nor Approximate

statistics

A discussion about models and the assumptions that underlie them.

Jan 1, 2024

11 min

Using Stata: Producing Consonance Functions

statistics

A simple guide on how to produce consonance functions in Stata.

Jan 1, 2024

16 min

Simulation of a Two-Group Parallel-Arm RCT with Interim Analyses

statistics

A simulation of a two-group parallel-arm randomized trial with interim analysis using the rpact package.

Feb 1, 2021

13 min

Tables, Graphs, and Computations from Rafi & Greenland (2020)

This post goes through the R code and logic that was used to construct the figures and concepts in Rafi & Greenland (2020) BMC MRM.

Dec 12, 2020

38 min

What Makes a Sensitivity Analysis?

statistics

Sensitivity analyses are an important part of statistical analyses, however, there are major misconceptions about what they do and what qualifies as such an analysis.

Dec 12, 2020

91 min

Medicine Is Being Treated with Snake-Oil Statistics

statistics

Nov 11, 2020

16 min

Quality Control in Statistical Analyses

statistics

Experienced statisticians and data analysts are familiar with stories where a coding error has led to an entire conclusion changing, even leading to a retraction. It’s the sort of stuff that keeps people up at night.

Jun 13, 2020

43 min

Book Review: Regression and Other Stories by Gelman, Hill, and Vehtari

An early look at Gelman et als new book, Regression and Other Stories, which is an update to their seminal 2006 book, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel Hierarchical Models.

Jun 11, 2019

3 min

Book Review: Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics

A review of Erich Lehmann’s last book, Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics.

Dec 30, 2018

25 min

GAMS

statistics

Some sample scripts

Nov 11, 2018

8 min

P-values Are Tough And S-values Can Help

statistics

An extensive discussion about what P-values are, their properties, common interpretations, misinterpretations, and how a measure called an S-value may better help us interpret them.

Nov 11, 2018

30 min

We May Not Understand Control Groups

Discussions praising the efficiency of randomized trials are widespread, however, few of these discussions take a close look at some of the common assumptions that individuals hold regarding randomized trials. And unfortunately, these common assumptions may be based on outdated evidence and simplistic ideas.

Oct 28, 2018

11 min

Analytical Issues In That New Low-Carb/LDL Study

nutrition

I take a quick look at some issues with the design and analysis of a

Oct 27, 2018

6 min

Influential Errors | The Diet Heart Tale

nutrition

A look at how an influential meta-analysis continues to be cited widely when it contains a major error that has gone unnoticed.

Oct 11, 2018

25 min

Misplaced Confidence in Observed Power

statistics

Another misinterpretation of what statistical power is and how trial results should be interpreted.

Sep 30, 2018

3 min

Misplaced Confidence in Observed Power

Another misinterpretation of what statistical power is and how trial results should be reported in a popular journal.

Sep 30, 2018

2 min

The Bradford Hill Criteria Don’t Hold Up

The Bradford Hill viewpoints are commonly used as a checklist to argue for causality when randomized trials aren’t possible. However, the originator of these viewpoints never intended for them to be used this way. In this post, I examine the shortcomings of using these viewpoints as a checklist in the real world.

Sep 6, 2018

14 min

Misuse of Standard Error in Clinical Trials

statistics

Analytic statistics are commonly used to make inferences from the data. However, they are often misused because of misconceptions about what they do. In this post, I discuss how standard error is commonly misused in clinical trials.

Aug 7, 2018

5 min

Vitamin E, Mortality, and the Bayesian Gloss

A look at a time when Bayesian data analysis went off the rails.

Jun 20, 2018

8 min

Problems with the Number Needed to Treat

The number needed to treat is a popular statistic used in medicine, but it has several problems associated with the way it is used and in this blog post, I discuss some of those problems and possible solutions.

May 27, 2018

8 min

Myth: Covariates Need to Be Balanced in RCTs

Many people believe that the purpose of randomization is to perfectly balance out both known and unknown covariates in order to reach causal inferences, however, this is simply not true and is a misunderstanding of the process of randomization.

Apr 10, 2018

4 min