ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Bonferroni correction

Imagine a classroom with ten kids. The teacher wants to give them all a piece of candy, but wants to make sure everyone gets an equal amount. So, instead of giving each kid one candy, the teacher decides to give each kid two candies to make sure they have enough.

The Bonferroni correction is kind of like the teacher's candy strategy. It's a way for scientists to make sure that their experiment results are fair and equal by adjusting the necessary values.

For example, imagine a scientist is testing three different medications to see which one is the most effective at treating a disease. The scientist wants to make sure that there are no false positives (mistakenly thinking that a drug works when it doesn't), so they use the Bonferroni correction.

The Bonferroni correction is like giving each medication extra scrutiny to make sure that there aren't any false positives. The scientist will essentially divide the necessary value (like a p-value, which measures how likely the results are due to chance) by the number of medications being tested.

So, if the necessary value is 0.05 and three medications are being tested, the scientist would adjust the necessary value to 0.0167 (0.05 divided by 3). This means that the results will only be considered statistically significant if they meet this stricter threshold.

In summary, the Bonferroni correction is a way for scientists to adjust necessary values based on how many variables they are testing to ensure that they get fair and accurate results.