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by jtaft 988 days ago
With an 95% confidence interval which doesn’t include zero, doesn’t it mean that it’s statistically significant?

Assuming data is valid and unbiased of course.

Not a statistician, just curious.

3 comments

Nope, you're thinking of regression coefficients, where you'd be correct that usually the null hypothesis is $\beta = 0$. In this case, what's being reported are odds ratios, so the null hypothesis would be that OR = 1.

The parent comment's point is that although the reported effect is significant at $\alpha = 0.05$ (the usual "95% CI" you mentioned), there are other problems that render their test of this hypothesis less than valid.

Ah thank you, had to read up on odds ratio.

edit for those curious about odds ratio https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK431098/#:~:text=The%20....

For odds ratio, you're looking for > 1.0, as 1.0 implies "the usual odds" i.e. the null hypothesis.
> With an 95% confidence interval which doesn’t include zero, doesn’t it mean that it’s statistically significant?

That’s explained here: https://xkcd.com/882/