Techniques in Team Science: The Preponderance of Evidence for Good Decision-Making in Biomechanics

Music City Center 

Statisticians use a variety of evidence to inform decisions about analytic strategies, whether a regression model meets the parametric assumptions or identifying the optimal solution in a principal components analysis. The analogous legal terminology refers to the compilation of evidence allowing for a "more likely than not" decision as the "preponderance of evidence." In the team science context, statisticians must help their collaborators understand the relative contribution and meaning of each source of evidence, both statistically and conceptually, when selecting and specifying models. This presentation outlines this approach, first with a simple example of assessing normality in a single variable, then describing the decision-making process in a clustering algorithm to identify subgroups within high-dimensional biomechanical measures. Without an optimal cluster solution-i.e., no preponderance of evidence-we discuss the requisite dialogue between the statistical evidence and domain evidence to arrive at a reasonable and useful conclusion. These examples are leveraged to provide recommendations for statisticians working as team scientists.

Team Science

Collaborative Research

Statistical Decision-Making

Cluster Analysis

Biomechanics 

Section on Statistical Consulting