Carlo Emilio Bonferroni

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Carlo Emilio Bonferroni (January 28, 1892 – August 18, 1960) was an Italian mathematician who worked on probability theory.

Bonferroni is famous for the Bonferroni correction, which states that if an experimenter is testing n independent hypotheses on a set of data, then the statistical significance level that should be used for each hypothesis separately is 1/n times what it would be if only one hypothesis were tested. For example, when testing two hypotheses, instead of a p value of 0.05, one would use a stricter p value of 0.025. The Bonferroni Correction is a safeguard against multiple tests of statistical significance on the same data, where 1/20 hypotheses tested will appear be significant at the p=0.05 level purely due to chance.

[edit] See also

• Bonferroni inequalities

[edit] References

• Abdi, H (2007). "Bonferroni and Sidak corrections for multiple comparisons", in N.J. Salkind (ed.): Encyclopedia of Measurement and Statistics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.