3 ms·

Let's pretend I don't have a PhD and don't know what that statement means though, can I get a summary?

• zmmmmm 9y ago
  It means the result could plausibly have occurred just by chance. The odds may be against it being chance, but it is at least plausible.
  • brucephillips 9y ago
    Eh, not really. What you said is true of any p value. It's tautological.
• mkl 9y ago
  This may help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study They found "support" for associations between homosexuality and some specific genetic code positions, but not strong enough evidence to be very sure of anything ("significance").
• epistasis 9y ago
  Shorter and less accurate than the Wikipedia page: A SNP is a single nucleotide polymorphism, a single letter variation in a genome. This study measured about half a million SNPs for each person. A statistical test is then performed to see how well each SNP site predicts the trait, generating a p-value. If a single such test were being performed, then typical "significant" p-value levels would be 0.05 or 0.01 or 0.001, these are arbitrary but generally accepted. For data from SNPs unassocisted with the trait, p-values come randomly and uniformlay from the range 0 to 1. So with a hundred SNPs unassocisted with the trait, a person would expect about one p-value at <= 0.01. There are many ways to correct for these multiple hypothesis tests. For GWAS, the generally accepted significance levels are 5e-8, which under the rubric of the fancily named but simple Bonferroni correction, would be equivalent to a 0.01 to 0.05 p-value from a single test. These two reported SNPs, when correcting for multiple testing, don't meet the standard definition of significant.