The Bonferroni Correction

The Bonferroni correction is a statistical method used to reduce the chance of false positives when conducting multiple tests simultaneously. When you perform many comparisons, there's a higher risk that some results appear significant just by chance. The correction adjusts the significance threshold (the cutoff for considering a result statistically meaningful) by dividing it by the number of tests performed. For example, if you have 10 tests and want an overall significance level of 0.05, each individual test's threshold becomes 0.005. This helps ensure that the overall likelihood of false positives stays controlled across all tests.