From f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu  Tue Feb 12 15:42:49 2013
From: f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu (Frank Harrell)
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2013 06:42:49 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Rd] Regression stars
In-Reply-To: <511A4F98.50209@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
References: <1360243924659-4657795.post@n4.nabble.com>
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	<CAC+N9BXeaBzBMGidTJbrBT_hjKM0fW5ey6EWBSBbVqk12LZXGQ@mail.gmail.com>
	<CAC+N9BVRxcWLtGwHGbBD=4=uAPSan4jEFYfOWsLLqV4FrSyLGA@mail.gmail.com>
	<51180503.1080605@gmail.com>
	<loom.20130212T145313-215@post.gmane.org>
	<511A4F98.50209@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
Message-ID: <1360680169120-4658268.post@n4.nabble.com>

Uwe I've been consulting for decades and have never once been asked for such
stars.  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
--
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[Rd] Regression stars
Frank Harrell