From sociologist Jay Livingston: The “Will & Grace” Conjecture That Won’t Die From sociologist David Weakliem: Why does Trump try to implement the unpopular ideas he’s proposed, and not the popular ideas? History professor who wrote award-winning book about 1970-era crime, is misinformed about the history of 1970s-era crime “West Virginia, which was a lock […] The post “The ‘Will & Grace’ Conjecture That Won’t Die” and other stories from…
Someone named Ramsey writes on behalf of a self-managed support community of 100+ systemic exercise intolerance disease (SEID) patients. He read my recent article on the topic and had a question regarding the following excerpt: For conditions like S.E.I.D., then, the better approach may be to gather data from people suffering “in the wild,” combining […] The post How to design future studies of systemic exercise intolerance disease (chronic fatigue…
From 2013: Don’t trust the Turk From 2017 (link from Kevin Lewis), from Jesse Chandler and Gabriele Paolacci: The Internet has enabled recruitment of large samples with specific characteristics. However, when researchers rely on participant self-report to determine eligibility, data quality depends on participant honesty. Across four studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk, we show that […] The post Should we continue not to trust the Turk? Another reminder of the…
Michael Feldman writes: My collaborators and myself are doing research where we try to understand the reasons for the variability in data analysis (“the garden of forking paths”). Our goal is to understand the reasons why scientists make different decisions regarding their analyses and in doing so reach different results. In a project called “Crowdsourcing […] The post They want help designing a crowdsourcing data analysis project appeared first on…
Above is a pair of graphs from a 2015 paper by Alison Gopnik, Thomas Griffiths, and Christopher Lucas. It takes up half a page in the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science. I think we can do better. First, what’s wrong with the above graphs? We could start with the details: As a reader, I […] The post Graphs as comparisons: A case study appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
In statistical work, design and data analysis are often considered separately. Sometimes we do all sorts of modeling and planning in the design stage, only to analyze data using simple comparisons. Other times, we design our studies casually, even thoughtlessly, and then try to salvage what we can using elaborate data analyses. It would be […] The post Hey—here are some tools in R and Stan to designing more effective…
This came from Bob Carpenter on the Stan mailing list: It’s not overfitting so much as model misspecification. I really like this line. If your model is correct, “overfitting” is impossible. In its usual form, “overfitting” comes from using too weak of a prior distribution. One might say that “weakness” of a prior distribution is […] The post What is “overfitting,” exactly? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
I came across this article by Joseph Bernstein, “Why Is A Top Harvard Law Professor Sharing Anti-Trump Conspiracy Theories?”: On April 22, Tribe shared a story from a website called the Palmer Report — a site that has been criticized for spreading hyperbole and false claims — entitled “Report: Trump gave $10 million in Russian […] The post Slaying Song appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
[cat picture] Christian Robert, Judith Rousseau, and I wrote: Several of the examples in [the book under review] represent solutions to problems that seem to us to be artificial or conventional tasks with no clear analogy to applied work. “They are artificial and are expressed in terms of a survey of 100 individuals expressing support […] The post Classical statisticians as Unitarians appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
Gurjinder Mohan writes: I was wondering if you had any advice specific to state space models when attempting model validation and calibration. I was planning on conducting a graphical posterior predictive check. I’d also recommend fake-data simulation. Beyond that, I’d need to know more about the example. I’m posting here because this seems like a […] The post 3 things that will surprise you about model validation and calibration for…
