Custodes: Auditable Hypothesis Testing
share
We present Custodes: a new approach to solving the complex issue of preventing "p-hacking" in scientific studies. The novel protocol provides a concrete and publicly auditable method for controlling false-discoveries and eliminates any potential for data dredging on the part of researchers during data-analysis phase. Custodes provides provable guarantees on the validity of each hypotheses test performed on a dataset by using cryptographic techniques to certify outcomes of statistical tests. Custodes achieves this using a decentralized authority and a tamper-proof ledger which enables the auditing of the hypothesis testing process. We present a construction of Custodes which we implement and evaluate using both real and synthetic datasets on common statistical tests, demonstrating the effectiveness and practicality of Custodes in the real world.
READ FULL TEXT