andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-83 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: People keep telling me that Sas isn’t as bad as everybody says, but then I see (from Christian Robert ) this listing from the Sas website of “disadvantages in using Bayesian analysis”: There is no correct way to choose a prior. Bayesian inferences require skills to translate prior beliefs into a mathematically formulated prior. If you do not proceed with caution, you can generate misleading results. . . . From a practical point of view, it might sometimes be difficult to convince subject matter experts who do not agree with the validity of the chosen prior. That is so tacky! As if least squares, logistic regressions, Cox models, and all those other likelihoods mentioned in the Sas documentation are so automatically convincing to subject matter experts. P.S. For some more serious objections to Bayesian statistics, see here and here . P.P.S. In case you’re wondering why I’m commenting on month-old blog entries . . . I have a monthlong backlog of entries, and I’m spooling
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 People keep telling me that Sas isn’t as bad as everybody says, but then I see (from Christian Robert ) this listing from the Sas website of “disadvantages in using Bayesian analysis”: There is no correct way to choose a prior. [sent-1, score-0.655]
2 Bayesian inferences require skills to translate prior beliefs into a mathematically formulated prior. [sent-2, score-0.826]
3 If you do not proceed with caution, you can generate misleading results. [sent-3, score-0.35]
4 From a practical point of view, it might sometimes be difficult to convince subject matter experts who do not agree with the validity of the chosen prior. [sent-7, score-0.928]
5 As if least squares, logistic regressions, Cox models, and all those other likelihoods mentioned in the Sas documentation are so automatically convincing to subject matter experts. [sent-9, score-1.019]
6 For some more serious objections to Bayesian statistics, see here and here . [sent-12, score-0.233]
7 In case you’re wondering why I’m commenting on month-old blog entries . [sent-16, score-0.459]
8 I have a monthlong backlog of entries, and I’m spooling them out day by day. [sent-19, score-0.345]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('sas', 0.44), ('entries', 0.224), ('monthlong', 0.193), ('subject', 0.165), ('objections', 0.159), ('caution', 0.159), ('disadvantages', 0.159), ('backlog', 0.152), ('tacky', 0.152), ('bayesian', 0.151), ('documentation', 0.149), ('formulated', 0.149), ('matter', 0.146), ('commenting', 0.144), ('cox', 0.142), ('likelihoods', 0.142), ('listing', 0.142), ('translate', 0.14), ('proceed', 0.137), ('convince', 0.137), ('mathematically', 0.125), ('squares', 0.12), ('christian', 0.118), ('convincing', 0.116), ('beliefs', 0.114), ('chosen', 0.114), ('generate', 0.11), ('automatically', 0.11), ('validity', 0.11), ('regressions', 0.107), ('skills', 0.105), ('misleading', 0.103), ('logistic', 0.099), ('require', 0.099), ('telling', 0.098), ('inferences', 0.094), ('experts', 0.094), ('robert', 0.094), ('everybody', 0.093), ('website', 0.093), ('mentioned', 0.092), ('wondering', 0.091), ('practical', 0.09), ('choose', 0.085), ('view', 0.078), ('correct', 0.076), ('serious', 0.074), ('says', 0.072), ('difficult', 0.072), ('keep', 0.068)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999994 83 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-13-Silly Sas lays out old-fashioned statistical thinking
Introduction: People keep telling me that Sas isn’t as bad as everybody says, but then I see (from Christian Robert ) this listing from the Sas website of “disadvantages in using Bayesian analysis”: There is no correct way to choose a prior. Bayesian inferences require skills to translate prior beliefs into a mathematically formulated prior. If you do not proceed with caution, you can generate misleading results. . . . From a practical point of view, it might sometimes be difficult to convince subject matter experts who do not agree with the validity of the chosen prior. That is so tacky! As if least squares, logistic regressions, Cox models, and all those other likelihoods mentioned in the Sas documentation are so automatically convincing to subject matter experts. P.S. For some more serious objections to Bayesian statistics, see here and here . P.P.S. In case you’re wondering why I’m commenting on month-old blog entries . . . I have a monthlong backlog of entries, and I’m spooling
2 0.17324382 1661 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-08-Software is as software does
Introduction: We had a recent discussion about statistics packages where people talked about the structure and capabilities of different computer languages. One thing I wanted to add to this discussion is some sociology. To me, a statistics package is not just its code, it’s also its community, it’s what people do with it. R, for example, is nothing special for graphics (again, I think in retrospect my graphs would be better if I’d been making them in Fortran all these years); what makes R graphics work so well is that there’s a clear path from the numbers to the graphs, there’s a tradition in R of postprocessing. In comparison, consider Sas. I’ve never directly used Sas but whenever I’ve seen it used, whether by people working for me or with me or just people down the hall who left Sas output sitting in the printer, in all these cases there’s no postprocessing. It doesn’t look interactive at all. The user runs some procedure and then there are pages and pages and pages of output. The po
3 0.15751781 1655 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-05-The statistics software signal
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to a post by Sean Taylor, who writes the following about users of R: You are willing to invest in learning something difficult. You do not care about aesthetics, only availability of packages and getting results quickly. To me, R is easy and Sas is difficult. I once worked with some students who were running Sas and the output was unreadable! Pages and pages of numbers that made no sense. When it comes to ease or difficulty of use, I think it depends on what you’re used to! And I really don’t understand the bit about aesthetics. What about this ? One reason I use R is to make pretty graphs. That said, if I’d never learned R, I’d just be making pretty graphs in Fortran or whatever. My guess is, the way I program, R is actually hindering rather than helping my ability to make attractive graphs. Half the time I’m scrambling around, writing custom code to get around R’s defaults.
4 0.14558588 1745 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-02-Classification error
Introduction: 15-2040 != 19-3010 (and, for that matter, 25-1022 != 25-1063).
5 0.12192738 1149 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-01-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Cox and Mayo
Introduction: The journal Rationality, Markets and Morals has finally posted all the articles in their special issue on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics. My contribution is called Induction and Deduction in Bayesian Data Analysis. I’ll also post my reactions to the other articles. I wrote these notes a few weeks ago and could post them all at once, but I think it will be easier if I post my reactions to each article separately. To start with my best material, here’s my reaction to David Cox and Deborah Mayo, “A Statistical Scientist Meets a Philosopher of Science.” I recommend you read all the way through my long note below; there’s good stuff throughout: 1. Cox: “[Philosophy] forces us to say what it is that we really want to know when we analyze a situation statistically.” This reminds me of a standard question that Don Rubin (who, unlike me, has little use for philosophy in his research) asks in virtually any situation: “What would you do if you had all the data?” For
7 0.1160816 2085 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-02-I’ve already written next year’s April Fools post!
8 0.10774683 91 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-16-RSS mess
9 0.10761113 1815 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-20-Displaying inferences from complex models
10 0.10049012 1885 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-06-Leahy Versus Albedoman and the Moneygoround, Part One
11 0.10023929 1779 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-27-“Two Dogmas of Strong Objective Bayesianism”
12 0.097050898 2200 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-05-Prior distribution for a predicted probability
13 0.095384963 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
14 0.093458012 1554 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-31-It not necessary that Bayesian methods conform to the likelihood principle
15 0.088640049 872 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Blog on applied probability modeling
16 0.085800439 1151 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-03-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Senn
17 0.084346995 231 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Yet another Bayesian job opportunity
18 0.082403608 331 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-10-Bayes jumps the shark
19 0.080398694 1155 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-05-What is a prior distribution?
20 0.080106609 1205 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-09-Coming to agreement on philosophy of statistics
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.124), (1, 0.067), (2, -0.055), (3, 0.048), (4, -0.054), (5, -0.003), (6, 0.011), (7, 0.024), (8, -0.006), (9, -0.007), (10, -0.006), (11, -0.042), (12, 0.036), (13, 0.031), (14, 0.009), (15, 0.043), (16, -0.004), (17, 0.02), (18, -0.021), (19, 0.038), (20, -0.003), (21, 0.042), (22, -0.057), (23, -0.013), (24, 0.002), (25, -0.025), (26, 0.01), (27, -0.01), (28, -0.022), (29, 0.002), (30, 0.025), (31, 0.005), (32, 0.047), (33, -0.018), (34, -0.01), (35, -0.023), (36, -0.008), (37, 0.011), (38, 0.015), (39, 0.01), (40, 0.004), (41, -0.027), (42, -0.019), (43, 0.029), (44, 0.017), (45, 0.019), (46, 0.011), (47, 0.013), (48, 0.008), (49, 0.008)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97099918 83 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-13-Silly Sas lays out old-fashioned statistical thinking
Introduction: People keep telling me that Sas isn’t as bad as everybody says, but then I see (from Christian Robert ) this listing from the Sas website of “disadvantages in using Bayesian analysis”: There is no correct way to choose a prior. Bayesian inferences require skills to translate prior beliefs into a mathematically formulated prior. If you do not proceed with caution, you can generate misleading results. . . . From a practical point of view, it might sometimes be difficult to convince subject matter experts who do not agree with the validity of the chosen prior. That is so tacky! As if least squares, logistic regressions, Cox models, and all those other likelihoods mentioned in the Sas documentation are so automatically convincing to subject matter experts. P.S. For some more serious objections to Bayesian statistics, see here and here . P.P.S. In case you’re wondering why I’m commenting on month-old blog entries . . . I have a monthlong backlog of entries, and I’m spooling
2 0.81611812 2000 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-28-Why during the 1950-1960′s did Jerry Cornfield become a Bayesian?
Introduction: Joel Greenhouse writes: I saw your recent paper on Feller [see here and, for a more fanciful theory, here ]. Looks like it was fun to write. I recently wrote a paper that asks an orthogonal question to yours. Why during the 1950-1960′s did Jerry Cornfield become a Bayesian? It appeared in Statistics in Medicine – “On becoming a Bayesian: Early correspondences between J. Cornfield and L. J. Savage.” In his paper, Greenhouse writes: Jerome Cornfield was arguably the leading proponent for the use of Bayesian methods in biostatistics during the 1960s. Prior to 1963, however, Cornfield had no publications in the area of Bayesian statistics. At a time when frequentist methods were the dominant influence on statistical practice, Cornfield went against the mainstream and embraced Bayes. . . . Cornfield’s interest in Bayesian methods began prior to 1961 and that the clarity of his Bayesian outlook began to take shape following Birnbaum’s ASA paper on the likelihood prin- cip
3 0.80690283 117 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-29-Ya don’t know Bayes, Jack
Introduction: I came across this article on the philosophy of statistics by University of Michigan economist John DiNardo. I don’t have much to say about the substance of the article because most of it is an argument against something called “Bayesian methods” that doesn’t have much in common with the Bayesian data analysis that I do. If an quantitative, empirically-minded economist at a top university doesn’t know about modern Bayesian methods, then it’s a pretty good guess that confusion holds in many other quarters as well, so I thought I’d try to clear a couple of things up. (See also here .) In the short term, I know I have some readers at the University of Michigan, so maybe a couple of you could go over to Prof. DiNardo’s office and discuss this with him? For the rest of you, please spread the word. My point here is not to claim that DiNardo should be using Bayesian methods or to claim that he’s doing anything wrong in his applied work. It’s just that he’s fighting against a bu
4 0.80621517 1151 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-03-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Senn
Introduction: Continuing with my discussion of the articles in the special issue of the journal Rationality, Markets and Morals on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics: Stephen Senn, “You May Believe You Are a Bayesian But You Are Probably Wrong”: I agree with Senn’s comments on the impossibility of the de Finetti subjective Bayesian approach. As I wrote in 2008, if you could really construct a subjective prior you believe in, why not just look at the data and write down your subjective posterior. The immense practical difficulties with any serious system of inference render it absurd to think that it would be possible to just write down a probability distribution to represent uncertainty. I wish, however, that Senn would recognize my Bayesian approach (which is also that of John Carlin, Hal Stern, Don Rubin, and, I believe, others). De Finetti is no longer around, but we are! I have to admit that my own Bayesian views and practices have changed. In particular, I resonate wit
5 0.80568415 449 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-04-Generalized Method of Moments, whatever that is
Introduction: Xuequn Hu writes: I am an econ doctoral student, trying to do some empirical work using Bayesian methods. Recently I read a paper(and its discussion) that pitches Bayesian methods against GMM (Generalized Method of Moments), which is quite popular in econometrics for frequentists. I am wondering if you can, here or on your blog, give some insights about these two methods, from the perspective of a Bayesian statistician. I know GMM does not conform to likelihood principle, but Bayesian are often charged with strong distribution assumptions. I can’t actually help on this, since I don’t know what GMM is. My guess is that, like other methods that don’t explicitly use prior estimation, this method will work well if sufficient information is included as data. Which would imply a hierarchical structure.
6 0.79820853 114 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-More on Bayesian deduction-induction
7 0.79819745 1157 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-07-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Hendry
8 0.79664326 133 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-08-Gratuitous use of “Bayesian Statistics,” a branding issue?
9 0.79266983 2254 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-18-Those wacky anti-Bayesians used to be intimidating, but now they’re just pathetic
10 0.78915131 1259 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-11-How things sound to us, versus how they sound to others
11 0.77756029 1779 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-27-“Two Dogmas of Strong Objective Bayesianism”
12 0.77279454 1228 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-25-Continuous variables in Bayesian networks
13 0.77166831 2368 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-11-Bayes in the research conversation
14 0.77113342 2293 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-16-Looking for Bayesian expertise in India, for the purpose of analysis of sarcoma trials
15 0.76991808 1182 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-24-Untangling the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox
16 0.76300675 110 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-26-Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics
17 0.76113164 792 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-08-The virtues of incoherence?
18 0.7560904 453 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-07-Biostatistics via Pragmatic and Perceptive Bayes.
19 0.74601072 1262 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-12-“Not only defended but also applied”: The perceived absurdity of Bayesian inference
20 0.74302071 1529 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-11-Bayesian brains?
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.02), (15, 0.032), (16, 0.053), (21, 0.041), (24, 0.121), (30, 0.018), (40, 0.02), (53, 0.016), (66, 0.018), (72, 0.187), (82, 0.054), (86, 0.03), (99, 0.284)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: We all know it’s ridiculous to be able to go on an fMRI fishing trip & resort to post hoc story-telling to explain the “significant” correlations one (inevitably) observes (good fMRI studies *don’t* do this; only bad ones do– to the injury of the reputation of all the scholars doing good studies of this kind). But now one doesn’t even need correlations that support the post-hoc inferences one is drawing. This one’s good. Kahan continues: Headline: Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain text: ” … The study, published March 30 [2011] in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation … The results showed significantly greater hippocampal atrophy in individuals reporting a life-changing religious experience. In addition, they found significantly greater hippocampal atrophy among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religiou
2 0.95929259 84 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-14-Is it 1930?
Introduction: Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute reports: Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the unacceptable. Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress. One might be surprised that Obama and congressional Democrats are not doing more to try to bring unemployment down. On the other hand, just to speak in generalities (not knowing any of the people involved), I would think that Obama would be much much more worried about the economy doing well in 2010 and then crashing in 2012. A crappy economy through 2011 and then improvement in 2012–that would be his ideal, no? Not that he would have the ability to time this sort of thing. But perhap
3 0.95823961 1179 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-21-“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading
Introduction: In her essay on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes: The much remarked “readability” of the book must have played a part in this smooth passage from the page to the screen, since “readability” has to do not only with freedom from obscurity but, paradoxically, with freedom from the actual sensation of reading [emphasis added]—of the tug and traction of words as they move thoughts into place in the mind. Requiring, in fact, the least reading, the most “readable” book allows its characters to slip easily through nets of words and into other forms. Popular art has been well defined by just this effortless movement from medium to medium, which is carried out, as Leslie Fiedler observed in relation to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “without loss of intensity or alteration of meaning.” Isabel Archer rises from the page only in the hanging garments of Henry James’s prose, but Scarlett O’Hara is a free woman. Well put. I wish Pierpoint would come out with ano
same-blog 4 0.95689923 83 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-13-Silly Sas lays out old-fashioned statistical thinking
Introduction: People keep telling me that Sas isn’t as bad as everybody says, but then I see (from Christian Robert ) this listing from the Sas website of “disadvantages in using Bayesian analysis”: There is no correct way to choose a prior. Bayesian inferences require skills to translate prior beliefs into a mathematically formulated prior. If you do not proceed with caution, you can generate misleading results. . . . From a practical point of view, it might sometimes be difficult to convince subject matter experts who do not agree with the validity of the chosen prior. That is so tacky! As if least squares, logistic regressions, Cox models, and all those other likelihoods mentioned in the Sas documentation are so automatically convincing to subject matter experts. P.S. For some more serious objections to Bayesian statistics, see here and here . P.P.S. In case you’re wondering why I’m commenting on month-old blog entries . . . I have a monthlong backlog of entries, and I’m spooling
5 0.95346481 741 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-02-At least he didn’t prove a false theorem
Introduction: Siobhan Mattison pointed me to this . I’m just disappointed they didn’t use my Fenimore Cooper line. Although I guess that reference wouldn’t resonate much outside the U.S. P.S. My guess was correct See comments below. Actually, the reference probably wouldn’t resonate so well among under-50-year-olds in the U.S. either. Sort of like the Jaycees story.
6 0.95030475 268 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-10-Fighting Migraine with Multilevel Modeling
7 0.95007992 1381 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-16-The Art of Fielding
8 0.94865781 737 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Memorial Day question
9 0.94604647 500 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-03-Bribing statistics
10 0.94123507 68 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-…pretty soon you’re talking real money.
11 0.94010758 1244 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-03-Meta-analyses of impact evaluations of aid programs
12 0.92746627 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
13 0.92692065 190 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-07-Mister P makes the big jump from the New York Times to the Washington Post
15 0.92313504 1079 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-23-Surveys show Americans are populist class warriors, except when they aren’t
16 0.92226326 550 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-02-An IV won’t save your life if the line is tangled
17 0.91731834 2331 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-12-On deck this week
18 0.91455418 624 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-22-A question about the economic benefits of universities
20 0.90364754 1907 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-20-Amazing retro gnu graphics!