andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-66 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris report in the New York Times that some serious statistical questions have been raised about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, an influential project that reports huge differences in health care costs and practices in different places in the United States, suggesting large potential cost savings if more efficient practices are used. (A claim that is certainly plausible to me, given this notorious graph ; see here for background.) Here’s an example of a claim from the Dartmouth Atlas (just picking something that happens to be featured on their webpage right now): Medicare beneficiaries who move to some regions receive many more diagnostic tests and new diagnoses than those who move to other regions. This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises important questions about whether being given more diagnoses is beneficial to patients and may help to explain recent controversies about regional differences in spending. A
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 ) Here’s an example of a claim from the Dartmouth Atlas (just picking something that happens to be featured on their webpage right now): Medicare beneficiaries who move to some regions receive many more diagnostic tests and new diagnoses than those who move to other regions. [sent-3, score-0.301]
2 This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises important questions about whether being given more diagnoses is beneficial to patients and may help to explain recent controversies about regional differences in spending. [sent-4, score-0.319]
3 Abelson and Harris’s article is interesting, thoughtful, and detailed, but along the way it reveals a serious limitation of the usual practices of journalism, when applied to evaluating scientific claims. [sent-6, score-0.121]
4 The problem is that Abelson and Harris apply a shotgun approach, shooting all sorts of criticisms at the study without a sense of what makes sense and what doesn’t. [sent-7, score-0.066]
5 Measures of the quality of care are not part of the formula. [sent-9, score-0.125]
6 For all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige [low-spending] regions than hospitals in the brown [high-spending] ones, and Dartmouth’s maps would not pick up that difference. [sent-10, score-1.626]
7 As any shopper knows, cheaper does not always mean better. [sent-11, score-0.101]
8 Setting the maps aside, could it really be true that “patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions than hospitals in the brown ones”? [sent-12, score-1.396]
9 And, in fact, later on in the news article, the authors write that, “a 2003 study found that patients who lived in places most expensive for the Medicare program received no better care than those who lived in cheaper areas. [sent-16, score-0.689]
10 ” So what’s the deal with “For all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions than hospitals in the brown ones”? [sent-17, score-1.58]
11 Abelson and Harris then write: Even Dartmouth’s claims about which hospitals and regions are cheapest may be suspect. [sent-23, score-0.533]
12 , may result less from how doctors work than from how patients live. [sent-27, score-0.345]
13 Also, nurses in Houston tend to be paid more than those in North Dakota because the cost of living is higher in Houston. [sent-29, score-0.113]
14 One of the striking things about the cost-of-care map is how little it corresponds with cost of living. [sent-31, score-0.071]
15 The high-cost regions include most of Texas, just about all of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee (as well as some more expensive places such as the Bosnywash area and much of California. [sent-32, score-0.291]
16 ) There may be a lot of problems with this study, but I can’t imagine that one of these problems is a lack of accounting for the (relatively) high cost of living in Houston. [sent-33, score-0.176]
17 Their fundamental difficulty, I think, is the challenge of writing about a technical topic (in this case, statistics) without the relevant technical experience. [sent-37, score-0.15]
18 ) The usual journalistic solution to reporting a technical controversy is to retreat to a he-said, she-said template, quoting experts on both sides and letting the reader decide. [sent-41, score-0.075]
19 Abelson and Harris do this a bit, with a quote from health economist David Cutler–but they only give Cutler one offhand sentence. [sent-45, score-0.082]
20 I’d be curious to hear what Cutler would say about the claim that “for all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions than hospitals in the brown ones. [sent-46, score-1.621]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('abelson', 0.437), ('dartmouth', 0.375), ('harris', 0.302), ('hospitals', 0.282), ('regions', 0.188), ('patients', 0.184), ('beige', 0.175), ('atlas', 0.15), ('cutler', 0.131), ('care', 0.125), ('dying', 0.123), ('brown', 0.105), ('cheaper', 0.101), ('doctors', 0.098), ('medicare', 0.094), ('greater', 0.089), ('skinner', 0.087), ('health', 0.082), ('bismarck', 0.08), ('ones', 0.077), ('technical', 0.075), ('houston', 0.075), ('orszag', 0.075), ('knows', 0.072), ('diagnoses', 0.072), ('practices', 0.072), ('cost', 0.071), ('study', 0.066), ('costs', 0.065), ('times', 0.064), ('may', 0.063), ('places', 0.057), ('numbers', 0.055), ('lived', 0.055), ('reporters', 0.053), ('far', 0.051), ('linking', 0.051), ('york', 0.05), ('influential', 0.049), ('evaluating', 0.049), ('maps', 0.046), ('anyone', 0.046), ('expensive', 0.046), ('living', 0.042), ('claim', 0.041), ('backfire', 0.04), ('hank', 0.04), ('louisiana', 0.04), ('merrill', 0.04), ('reed', 0.04)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
Introduction: Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris report in the New York Times that some serious statistical questions have been raised about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, an influential project that reports huge differences in health care costs and practices in different places in the United States, suggesting large potential cost savings if more efficient practices are used. (A claim that is certainly plausible to me, given this notorious graph ; see here for background.) Here’s an example of a claim from the Dartmouth Atlas (just picking something that happens to be featured on their webpage right now): Medicare beneficiaries who move to some regions receive many more diagnostic tests and new diagnoses than those who move to other regions. This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises important questions about whether being given more diagnoses is beneficial to patients and may help to explain recent controversies about regional differences in spending. A
2 0.26351866 67 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-More on that Dartmouth health care study
Introduction: Hank Aaron at the Brookings Institution, who knows a lot more about policy than I do, had some interesting comments on the recent New York Times article about problems with the Dartmouth health care atlas. which I discussed a few hours ago . Aaron writes that much of the criticism in that newspaper article was off-base, but that there are real difficulties in translating the Dartmouth results (finding little relation between spending and quality of care) to cost savings in the real world. Aaron writes: The Dartmouth research, showing huge variation in the use of various medical procedures and large variations in per patient spending under Medicare, has been a revelation and a useful one. There is no way to explain such variation on medical grounds and it is problematic. But readers, including my former colleague Orszag, have taken an oversimplistic view of what the numbers mean and what to do about them. There are three really big problems with the common interpreta
Introduction: Maggie Fox writes : Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret “real time” brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week. The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. . . . About half the volunteers had correctly predicted whether they would use sunscreen. The research team analyzed and re-analyzed the MRI scans to see if they could find any brain activity that would do better. Activity in one area of the brain, a particular part of the medial prefrontal cortex, provided the best information. “From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman said. “It is the one re
4 0.13235082 1649 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-02-Back when 50 miles was a long way
Introduction: This post is by Phil. Michael Graham Richard has posted some great maps from the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States; the maps show how long it took to get to various places in the U.S. from New York City in 1800, 1830, 1857, and 1930. (I wonder if the atlas has one from around 1900 as well, that didn’t make it into the article? I’d like to see it, too, if it exists.) Worth a look. This post is by Phil. Time to get to anywhere in the conterminous states from New York City, in 1857
5 0.12138508 97 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-18-Economic Disparities and Life Satisfaction in European Regions
Introduction: Grazia Pittau, Roberto Zelli, and I came out with a paper investigating the role of economic variables in predicting regional disparities in reported life satisfaction of European Union citizens. We use multilevel modeling to explicitly account for the hierarchical nature of our data, respondents within regions and countries, and for understanding patterns of variation within and between regions. Here’s what we found: - Personal income matters more in poor regions than in rich regions, a pattern that still holds for regions within the same country. - Being unemployed is negatively associated with life satisfaction even after controlled for income variation. Living in high unemployment regions does not alleviate the unhappiness of being out of work. - After controlling for individual characteristics and modeling interactions, regional differences in life satisfaction still remain. Here’s a quick graph; there’s more in the article:
6 0.11577984 1906 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-19-“Behind a cancer-treatment firm’s rosy survival claims”
7 0.11454295 411 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-13-Ethical concerns in medical trials
8 0.093481809 38 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-18-Breastfeeding, infant hyperbilirubinemia, statistical graphics, and modern medicine
9 0.089443617 2177 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-19-“The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness”
10 0.086273879 2076 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-24-Chasing the noise: W. Edwards Deming would be spinning in his grave
11 0.078134537 1535 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-16-Bayesian analogue to stepwise regression?
12 0.077437215 2053 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-06-Ideas that spread fast and slow
13 0.077429004 2049 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-03-On house arrest for p-hacking
14 0.073393807 967 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-20-Picking on Gregg Easterbrook
15 0.07338874 957 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-14-Questions about a study of charter schools
16 0.072504461 820 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-25-Design of nonrandomized cluster sample study
17 0.068893053 490 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-29-Brain Structure and the Big Five
18 0.067672044 465 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-13-$3M health care prediction challenge
19 0.067636818 636 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-The Conservative States of America
20 0.067018919 524 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-19-Data exploration and multiple comparisons
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.154), (1, -0.063), (2, 0.018), (3, -0.027), (4, 0.005), (5, -0.021), (6, 0.008), (7, 0.003), (8, -0.007), (9, 0.002), (10, -0.037), (11, -0.012), (12, -0.004), (13, 0.022), (14, 0.001), (15, 0.028), (16, 0.035), (17, -0.002), (18, 0.012), (19, 0.025), (20, -0.005), (21, 0.023), (22, 0.006), (23, 0.006), (24, -0.001), (25, 0.01), (26, -0.008), (27, -0.003), (28, 0.024), (29, -0.008), (30, 0.002), (31, 0.004), (32, 0.022), (33, 0.001), (34, 0.03), (35, 0.006), (36, -0.013), (37, 0.022), (38, 0.012), (39, 0.005), (40, 0.027), (41, -0.04), (42, -0.04), (43, 0.038), (44, 0.012), (45, 0.004), (46, -0.001), (47, 0.007), (48, -0.037), (49, -0.046)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.94977945 66 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-How can news reporters avoid making mistakes when reporting on technical issues? Or, Data used to justify “Data Used to Justify Health Savings Can Be Shaky” can be shaky
Introduction: Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris report in the New York Times that some serious statistical questions have been raised about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, an influential project that reports huge differences in health care costs and practices in different places in the United States, suggesting large potential cost savings if more efficient practices are used. (A claim that is certainly plausible to me, given this notorious graph ; see here for background.) Here’s an example of a claim from the Dartmouth Atlas (just picking something that happens to be featured on their webpage right now): Medicare beneficiaries who move to some regions receive many more diagnostic tests and new diagnoses than those who move to other regions. This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises important questions about whether being given more diagnoses is beneficial to patients and may help to explain recent controversies about regional differences in spending. A
2 0.89020598 67 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-More on that Dartmouth health care study
Introduction: Hank Aaron at the Brookings Institution, who knows a lot more about policy than I do, had some interesting comments on the recent New York Times article about problems with the Dartmouth health care atlas. which I discussed a few hours ago . Aaron writes that much of the criticism in that newspaper article was off-base, but that there are real difficulties in translating the Dartmouth results (finding little relation between spending and quality of care) to cost savings in the real world. Aaron writes: The Dartmouth research, showing huge variation in the use of various medical procedures and large variations in per patient spending under Medicare, has been a revelation and a useful one. There is no way to explain such variation on medical grounds and it is problematic. But readers, including my former colleague Orszag, have taken an oversimplistic view of what the numbers mean and what to do about them. There are three really big problems with the common interpreta
Introduction: Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your defense of your hypothesis is that maybe the study just didn’t have enough power, what you’re actually saying is “the beneficial effects are probably pretty small”. and A good Bayesian—and aren’t most of us are supposed to be good Bayesians these days?—should be updating in light of this new information. Given this result, what is the likelihood that Obamacare will have a positive impact on the average health of Americans? Every one of us, for or against, should be revising that probability downwards. I’m not saying that you have to revise it to zero; I certainly haven’t. But however high it was yesterday, it should be somewhat lower today. This
4 0.82126087 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
Introduction: This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to pick just one. But here ya go. This figure shows fatalities (among cyclists) versus distance cycled, with a point for each year…unfortunately ending in way back in 1998, but still: This is a good alternative to the more common choice for this sort of plot, which would be overlaying curves of fatalities vs time and distance cycled vs time. The article also explicitly discusses the fact, previously discussed on this blog , that it’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer . Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if peo
5 0.8197515 2049 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-03-On house arrest for p-hacking
Introduction: People keep pointing me to this excellent news article by David Brown, about a scientist who was convicted of data manipulation: In all, 330 patients were randomly assigned to get either interferon gamma-1b or placebo injections. Disease progression or death occurred in 46 percent of those on the drug and 52 percent of those on placebo. That was not a significant difference, statistically speaking. When only survival was considered, however, the drug looked better: 10 percent of people getting the drug died, compared with 17 percent of those on placebo. However, that difference wasn’t “statistically significant,” either. Specifically, the so-called P value — a mathematical measure of the strength of the evidence that there’s a true difference between a treatment and placebo — was 0.08. . . . Technically, the study was a bust, although the results leaned toward a benefit from interferon gamma-1b. Was there a group of patients in which the results tipped? Harkonen asked the statis
6 0.80841506 584 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-22-“Are Wisconsin Public Employees Underpaid?”
8 0.79036611 1906 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-19-“Behind a cancer-treatment firm’s rosy survival claims”
11 0.78119808 702 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-09-“Discovered: the genetic secret of a happy life”
12 0.77911735 284 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Continuing efforts to justify false “death panels” claim
13 0.77781397 465 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-13-$3M health care prediction challenge
16 0.77560437 1187 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-“Apple confronts the law of large numbers” . . . huh?
18 0.77104193 68 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-…pretty soon you’re talking real money.
19 0.76380056 1397 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Stand Your Ground laws and homicides
20 0.76341707 116 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-29-How to grab power in a democracy – in 5 easy non-violent steps
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.036), (15, 0.03), (16, 0.064), (21, 0.026), (24, 0.147), (27, 0.157), (42, 0.02), (45, 0.023), (63, 0.02), (68, 0.017), (76, 0.01), (82, 0.015), (98, 0.01), (99, 0.252)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.96769315 802 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-13-Super Sam Fuld Needs Your Help (with Foul Ball stats)
Introduction: I was pleasantly surprised to have my recreational reading about baseball in the New Yorker interrupted by a digression on statistics. Sam Fuld of the Tampa Bay Rays, was the subjet of a Ben McGrath profile in the 4 July 2011 issue of the New Yorker , in an article titled Super Sam . After quoting a minor-league trainer who described Fuld as “a bit of a geek” (who isn’t these days?), McGrath gets into that lovely New Yorker detail: One could have pointed out the more persuasive and telling examples, such as the fact that in 2005, after his first pro season, with the Class-A Peoria Chiefs, Fuld applied for a fall internship with Stats, Inc., the research firm that supplies broadcasters with much of the data anad analysis that you hear in sports telecasts. After a description of what they had him doing, reviewing footage of games and cataloguing, he said “I thought, They have a stat for everything, but they don’t have any stats regarding foul balls.” Fuld’s
2 0.96325743 134 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-08-“What do you think about curved lines connecting discrete data-points?”
Introduction: John Keltz writes: What do you think about curved lines connecting discrete data-points? (For example, here .) The problem with the smoothed graph is it seems to imply that something is going on in between the discrete data points, which is false. However, the straight-line version isn’t representing actual events either- it is just helping the eye connect each point. So maybe the curved version is also just helping the eye connect each point, and looks better doing it. In my own work (value-added modeling of achievement test scores) I use straight lines, but I guess I am not too bothered when people use smoothing. I’d appreciate your input. Regular readers will be unsurprised that, yes, I have an opinion on this one, and that this opinion is connected to some more general ideas about statistical graphics. In general I’m not a fan of the curved lines. They’re ok, but I don’t really see the point. I can connect the dots just fine without the curves. The more general id
Introduction: Someone passed on to a message from his university library announcing that the journal “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” is no longer free. Librarians have to decide what to do, so I thought I’d offer the following consumer guide: Wiley Computational Statistics journal Wikipedia Frequency 6 issues per year Continuously updated Includes articles from Wikipedia? Yes Yes Cites the Wikipedia sources it uses? No Yes Edited by recipient of ASA Founders Award? Yes No Articles are subject to rigorous review? No Yes Errors, when discovered, get fixed? No Yes Number of vertices in n-dimensional hypercube? 2n 2 n Easy access to Brady Bunch trivia? No Yes Cost (North America) $1400-$2800 $0 Cost (UK) £986-£1972 £0 Cost (Europe) €1213-€2426 €0 The choice seems pretty clear to me! It’s funny for the Wiley journal to start charging now
4 0.95541239 343 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-15-?
Introduction: How am I supposed to handle this sort of thing? (See below.) I just stuck it one of my email folders without responding, but then I wondered . . . what’s it all about? Is there some sort of Glengarry Glen Ross-like parallel world where down-on-their-luck Jack Lemmons of public relations world send out electronic cold calls? More than anything else, this sort of thing makes me glad I have a steady job. Here’s the (unsolicited) email, which came with the subject line “Please help a reporter do his job”: Dear Andrew, As an Editor for the Bulldog Reporter (www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog), a media relations trade publication, my job is to help ensure that my readers have accurate info about you and send you the best quality pitches. By taking five minutes or less to answer my questions (pasted below), you’ll receive targeted PR pitches from our client base that will match your beat and interests. Any help or direction is appreciated. Here are my questions. We have you listed
5 0.95207882 1472 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-28-Migrating from dot to underscore
Introduction: My C-oriented Stan collaborators have convinced me to use underscore (_) rather than dot (.) as much as possible in expressions in R. For example, I can name a variable n_years rather than n.years. This is fine. But I’m getting annoyed because I need to press the shift key every time I type the underscore. What do people do about this? I know that it’s easy enough to reassign keys (I could, for example, assign underscore to backslash, which I never use). I’m just wondering what C programmers actually do. Do they reassign the key or do they just get used to pressing Shift? P.S. In comments, Ben Hyde points to Google’s R style guide, which recommends that variable names use dots, not underscore or camel case, for variable names (for example, “avg.clicks” rather than “avg_Clicks” or “avgClicks”). I think they’re recommending this to be consistent with R coding conventions . I am switching to underscores in R variable names to be consistent with C. Otherwise we were run
6 0.94651997 465 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-13-$3M health care prediction challenge
7 0.9458403 1238 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-31-Dispute about ethics of data sharing
8 0.9435252 173 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-31-Editing and clutch hitting
9 0.94347662 708 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Improvement of 5 MPG: how many more auto deaths?
10 0.93934143 804 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-15-Static sensitivity analysis
11 0.93915951 347 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-17-Getting arm and lme4 running on the Mac
same-blog 12 0.93605143 66 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-How can news reporters avoid making mistakes when reporting on technical issues? Or, Data used to justify “Data Used to Justify Health Savings Can Be Shaky” can be shaky
14 0.91953099 341 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-14-Confusion about continuous probability densities
15 0.91820604 1869 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-24-In which I side with Neyman over Fisher
16 0.91756183 120 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-30-You can’t put Pandora back in the box
17 0.91123998 2177 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-19-“The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness”
18 0.91118813 1982 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-15-Blaming scientific fraud on the Kuhnians
20 0.89808953 2319 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-05-Can we make better graphs of global temperature history?