Carlo Emilio Bonferroni

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 dependent or 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 of the hypotheses tested at the p = 0.05 level will appear be significant purely due to chance.