Chris Donkin

• October 09, 2018
• Speaker: Chris Donkin
  
• Topic: Back to the Drawing Board: Is the exploration part of our research program inefficient?
  

Most of us were trained to do hypothesis testing above all else. Most experiments are planned around an eventual hypothesis test. While hypothesis testing is an integral part of the research process, it should be reserved for when we have competing hypotheses that make quantitative predictions for data, rather than a null and a ‘default’ alternative. More concerning is that the premature use of hypothesis testing may actually stymie the development of quantitative models, since the space of potential experiments goes relatively under-explored. I will outline some potentially interesting alternative methods for exploring experimental design spaces.