{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-least-difference-in-means-a-statistic-for","title":"The Least Difference in Means: A Statistic for Effect Size Strength and Practical Significance","arxiv_id":"2205.12958","date":"2022-05-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bruce A. Corliss","Yaotian Wang","Heman Shakeri","Philip E. Bourne"],"abstract":"With limited resources, scientific inquiries must be prioritized for further study, funding, and translation based on their practical significance: whether the effect size is large enough to be meaningful in the real world. Doing so must evaluate a result's effect strength, defined as a conservative assessment of practical significance. We propose the least difference in means ($\\delta_L$) as a two-sample statistic that can quantify effect strength and perform a hypothesis test to determine if a result has a meaningful effect size. To facilitate consensus, $\\delta_L$ allows scientists to compare effect strength between related results and choose different thresholds for hypothesis testing without recalculation. Both $\\delta_L$ and the relative $\\delta_L$ outperform other candidate statistics in identifying results with higher effect strength. We use real data to demonstrate how the relative $\\delta_L$ compares effect strength across broadly related experiments. The relative $\\delta_L$ can prioritize research based on the strength of their results.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12958v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.12958v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-least-difference-in-means-a-statistic-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/bac7wj/ACES","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"the-least-difference-in-means-a-statistic-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/bac7wj/contra","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}