P-value
In null-hypothesis significance testing, the p-value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the result actually observed, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. A very small p-value means that such an extreme observed outcome would be very unlikely under the null hypothesis. Even though reporting p-values of statistical tests is common practice in academic publications of many quantitative fields, misinterpretation and misuse of p-values is widespread and has been a major topic in mathematics and metascience. In 2016, the American Statistician Association (ASA) made a formal statement that "p-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone" and that "a p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result" or "evidence regarding a model or hypothesis." That said, a 2019 task force by ASA has issued a statement on statistical significance and replicability, concluding with: "p-values and significance tests, when properly applied and interpreted, increase the rigor of the conclusions drawn from data." In statistics, every conjecture concerning the unknown probability distribution of a collection of random variables representing the observed data in some study is called a statistical hypothesis. If we state one hypothesis only and the aim of the statistical test is to see whether this hypothesis is tenable, but not to investigate other specific hypotheses, then such a test is called a null hypothesis test. As our statistical hypothesis will, by definition, state some property of the distribution, the null hypothesis is the default hypothesis under which that property does not exist. The null hypothesis is typically that some parameter (such as a correlation or a difference between means) in the populations of interest is zero. Our hypothesis might specify the probability distribution of precisely, or it might only specify that it belongs to some class of distributions.