andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-109 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Christian Robert is planning a graduate seminar in which students read 15 classic articles of statistics. (See here for more details and a slightly different list.) Actually, he just writes “classics,” but based on his list, I assume he only wants articles, not books. If he wanted to include classic books, I’d nominate the following, just for starters: - Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers - Snedecor and Cochran’s Statistical Methods - Kish’s Survey Sampling - Box, Hunter, and Hunter’s Statistics for Experimenters - Tukey’s Exploratory Data Analysis - Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data - Mosteller and Wallace’s book on the Federalist Papers. Probably Cox and Hinkley, too. That’s a book that I don’t think has aged well, but it seems to have had a big influence. I think there’s a lot more good and accessible material in these classic books than in the equivalent volume of classic articles. Journal articles can be difficult to read and are typicall
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Christian Robert is planning a graduate seminar in which students read 15 classic articles of statistics. [sent-1, score-0.57]
2 I think there’s a lot more good and accessible material in these classic books than in the equivalent volume of classic articles. [sent-7, score-0.712]
3 Journal articles can be difficult to read and are typically filled with irrelevant theoretical material, the kind of stuff you need to include to impress the referees. [sent-8, score-0.355]
4 One thing that struck me about the list supplied by Christian is how many of these articles I would definitely not include in such a course. [sent-12, score-0.404]
5 Similarly, I can’t see the point of including the paper by Hastings (1970). [sent-15, score-0.278]
6 The paper is fine–I’d be proud to have written it, in fact I’d gladly admit that it’s better than 90% of anything I’ve ever published–but it seems more of a minor note than a “classic. [sent-24, score-0.412]
7 It’s a fine article and the EM algorithm has been tremendously useful, but, still, I think it’s more about computation than statistics. [sent-27, score-0.238]
8 As to Berger and Sellke (1987), well, yes, this paper has had an immense influence, at least among theoretical statisticians–but I think the paper is basically wrong! [sent-28, score-0.428]
9 I don’t want to label a paper as a classic if it’s sent much of the field in the wrong direction. [sent-29, score-0.486]
10 For other papers on Christian’s list, I can see the virtue of including in a seminar. [sent-30, score-0.249]
11 This article, which appears in a volume of papers dedicated to George Snedecor, is a lot of fun (even if in many ways unsound). [sent-45, score-0.257]
12 I prefer this slightly to Mallows’s paper on Cp, written at about the same time (but I like the Mallows paper too). [sent-49, score-0.486]
13 The methods in the paper are mostly out of date, but it’s worth it for the discussion (especially the (inadvertently) hilarious contribution of Kempthorne). [sent-53, score-0.273]
14 If you only want to include one Rubin article, keep this one and leave “Inference and missing data” for students to discover on their own. [sent-67, score-0.326]
15 Perhaps there’s some general principle that papers published in year X have the most influence on graduate students in year X+15. [sent-73, score-0.435]
16 Anything earlier seems simply out of date (that’s how I feel about Stein’s classic papers, for example; sure, they’re fine, but I don’t see their relevance to anything I’m doing today, in contrast to the above-noted works by Tukey, Akaike, etc. [sent-74, score-0.541]
17 I’m thinking of influential papers by Wilcoxon, Box and Cox, and zillions of papers of that introduced particular hypothesis tests (the sort that have names that they tell you in a biostatistics class). [sent-80, score-0.481]
18 Individually, these papers are fine, but I don’t see that students would get much out of reading them. [sent-81, score-0.349]
19 If I was going to pick any paper of that genre, I’d pick Deming and Stephan’s 1940 article on iterative proportional fitting. [sent-82, score-0.273]
20 Any other classics you’d like to nominate (or places where you disagree with me)? [sent-84, score-0.364]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('christian', 0.294), ('classic', 0.272), ('classics', 0.255), ('paper', 0.214), ('papers', 0.185), ('include', 0.15), ('articles', 0.135), ('cox', 0.133), ('mallows', 0.133), ('pitman', 0.133), ('rubin', 0.127), ('tukey', 0.124), ('list', 0.119), ('influential', 0.111), ('nominate', 0.109), ('hunter', 0.105), ('snedecor', 0.105), ('students', 0.1), ('books', 0.096), ('algorithm', 0.096), ('akaike', 0.095), ('clustering', 0.093), ('influence', 0.087), ('neyman', 0.085), ('fine', 0.083), ('missing', 0.076), ('date', 0.074), ('fisher', 0.074), ('volume', 0.072), ('box', 0.072), ('stuff', 0.07), ('anything', 0.069), ('minor', 0.067), ('see', 0.064), ('graduate', 0.063), ('seems', 0.062), ('hinkley', 0.06), ('durbin', 0.06), ('laird', 0.06), ('nominations', 0.06), ('strawderman', 0.06), ('unsound', 0.06), ('wong', 0.06), ('discussion', 0.059), ('article', 0.059), ('statistical', 0.058), ('slightly', 0.058), ('inference', 0.058), ('cp', 0.057), ('federalist', 0.057)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 109 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-25-Classics of statistics
Introduction: Christian Robert is planning a graduate seminar in which students read 15 classic articles of statistics. (See here for more details and a slightly different list.) Actually, he just writes “classics,” but based on his list, I assume he only wants articles, not books. If he wanted to include classic books, I’d nominate the following, just for starters: - Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers - Snedecor and Cochran’s Statistical Methods - Kish’s Survey Sampling - Box, Hunter, and Hunter’s Statistics for Experimenters - Tukey’s Exploratory Data Analysis - Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data - Mosteller and Wallace’s book on the Federalist Papers. Probably Cox and Hinkley, too. That’s a book that I don’t think has aged well, but it seems to have had a big influence. I think there’s a lot more good and accessible material in these classic books than in the equivalent volume of classic articles. Journal articles can be difficult to read and are typicall
2 0.21823289 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
3 0.18123402 2277 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-31-The most-cited statistics papers ever
Introduction: Robert Grant has a list . I’ll just give the ones with more than 10,000 Google Scholar cites: Cox (1972) Regression and life tables: 35,512 citations. Dempster, Laird, Rubin (1977) Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm: 34,988 Bland & Altman (1986) Statistical methods for assessing agreement between two methods of clinical measurement: 27,181 Geman & Geman (1984) Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs distributions, and the Bayesian restoration of images: 15,106 We can find some more via searching Google scholar for familiar names and topics; thus: Metropolis et al. (1953) Equation of state calculations by fast computing machines: 26,000 Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing: 21,000 White (1980) A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity: 18,000 Heckman (1977) Sample selection bias as a specification error:
4 0.16752324 1951 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-22-Top 5 stat papers since 2000?
Introduction: Jeff Leek writes: I just wrote this post about what the 5 most influential papers in statistics from 2000-2010. I would be really curious to know your list too? Scarily enough I can’t think of any truly influential papers from that decade. I suppose this means I’m getting old! P.S. I did once make a list of the top 5 unpublished papers in statistics .
5 0.15822482 2151 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-27-Should statistics have a Nobel prize?
Introduction: Xiao-Li says yes: The most compelling reason for having highly visible awards in any field is to enhance its ability to attract future talent. Virtually all the media and public attention our profession received in recent years has been on the utility of statistics in all walks of life. We are extremely happy for and proud of this recognition—it is long overdue. However, the media and public have given much more attention to the Fields Medal than to the COPSS Award, even though the former has hardly been about direct or even indirect impact on everyday life. Why this difference? . . . these awards arouse media and public interest by featuring how ingenious the awardees are and how difficult the problems they solved, much like how conquering Everest bestows admiration not because the admirers care or even know much about Everest itself but because it represents the ultimate physical feat. In this sense, the biggest winner of the Fields Medal is mathematics itself: enticing the brig
6 0.15268922 1928 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-06-How to think about papers published in low-grade journals?
7 0.14869106 690 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-01-Peter Huber’s reflections on data analysis
9 0.14231531 128 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-05-The greatest works of statistics never published
10 0.13877703 1149 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-01-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Cox and Mayo
11 0.13524544 1869 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-24-In which I side with Neyman over Fisher
13 0.12962009 834 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-01-I owe it all to the haters
14 0.12541172 2279 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-02-Am I too negative?
15 0.12383877 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
16 0.12320542 1721 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-13-A must-read paper on statistical analysis of experimental data
17 0.12112174 2006 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-03-Evaluating evidence from published research
18 0.1209963 738 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Works well versus well understood
19 0.11924599 244 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-30-Useful models, model checking, and external validation: a mini-discussion
20 0.11850791 1605 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-04-Write This Book
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.274), (1, 0.002), (2, -0.101), (3, -0.047), (4, -0.017), (5, -0.021), (6, 0.005), (7, -0.012), (8, 0.022), (9, -0.036), (10, 0.107), (11, 0.012), (12, -0.027), (13, -0.003), (14, 0.073), (15, -0.066), (16, -0.019), (17, 0.04), (18, -0.038), (19, -0.032), (20, 0.031), (21, -0.02), (22, 0.055), (23, 0.029), (24, 0.034), (25, 0.01), (26, -0.04), (27, 0.052), (28, 0.015), (29, 0.034), (30, 0.033), (31, 0.004), (32, 0.048), (33, -0.026), (34, -0.084), (35, -0.042), (36, 0.047), (37, -0.007), (38, -0.01), (39, 0.043), (40, -0.046), (41, -0.006), (42, 0.004), (43, -0.005), (44, 0.038), (45, 0.05), (46, 0.004), (47, -0.092), (48, -0.016), (49, 0.026)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97017747 109 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-25-Classics of statistics
Introduction: Christian Robert is planning a graduate seminar in which students read 15 classic articles of statistics. (See here for more details and a slightly different list.) Actually, he just writes “classics,” but based on his list, I assume he only wants articles, not books. If he wanted to include classic books, I’d nominate the following, just for starters: - Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers - Snedecor and Cochran’s Statistical Methods - Kish’s Survey Sampling - Box, Hunter, and Hunter’s Statistics for Experimenters - Tukey’s Exploratory Data Analysis - Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data - Mosteller and Wallace’s book on the Federalist Papers. Probably Cox and Hinkley, too. That’s a book that I don’t think has aged well, but it seems to have had a big influence. I think there’s a lot more good and accessible material in these classic books than in the equivalent volume of classic articles. Journal articles can be difficult to read and are typicall
2 0.78731734 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
3 0.78230441 1272 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-20-More proposals to reform the peer-review system
Introduction: Chris Said points us to two proposals to fix the system for reviewing scientific papers. Both the proposals are focused on biological research. Said writes : The growing problems with scientific research are by now well known: Many results in the top journals are cherry picked, methodological weaknesses and other important caveats are often swept under the rug, and a large fraction of findings cannot be replicated. In some rare cases, there is even outright fraud. This waste of resources is unfair to the general public that pays for most of the research. . . . Scientists have known about these problems for decades, and there have been several well-intentioned efforts to fix them. The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis (JASNH) is specifically dedicated to null results. . . . Simmons and colleagues (2011) have proposed lists of regulations for other journals to enforce, including minimum sample sizes and requirements for the disclosure of all variables and
4 0.7683332 675 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-22-Arrow’s other theorem
Introduction: I received the following email from someone who’d like to remain anonymous: Lately I [the anonymous correspondent] witnessed that Bruno Frey has published two articles in two well known referreed journals on the Titanic disaster that try to explain survival rates of passenger on board. The articles were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Rationality & Society . While looking up the name of the second journal where I stumbled across the article I even saw that they put the message in a third journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America . To say it in Sopranos like style – with all due respect, I know Bruno Frey from conferences, I really appreciate his take on economics as a social science and he has really published more interesting stuff that most economists ever will. But putting the same message into three journals gives me headaches for at least two reasons: 1) When building a track record and scientific rep
5 0.7564311 2233 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-04-Literal vs. rhetorical
Introduction: Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone is a methodologist.” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. The final twist was that one of the orgtheory bloggers deleted a comment and then closed the thread entirely when the discussion got too conflictual. In a few days I’ll return to the meta-topic of the discussion, but right now I want to focus on one thing Davis wrote, a particular statement that illustrates to me the gap between the rhetorical and the literal, the way in which a statement can sound good but make no sense. He
6 0.75454265 128 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-05-The greatest works of statistics never published
8 0.74347514 2353 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-30-I posted this as a comment on a sociology blog
9 0.73330945 2055 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-08-A Bayesian approach for peer-review panels? and a speculation about Bruno Frey
12 0.72241843 2279 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-02-Am I too negative?
13 0.71476454 2244 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-11-What if I were to stop publishing in journals?
14 0.71286935 1254 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-09-In the future, everyone will publish everything.
15 0.71210217 1435 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-30-Retracted articles and unethical behavior in economics journals?
16 0.71176893 172 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-30-Why don’t we have peer reviewing for oral presentations?
17 0.71171135 1120 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-15-Fun fight over the Grover search algorithm
18 0.70892417 1917 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-28-Econ coauthorship update
19 0.70734799 2151 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-27-Should statistics have a Nobel prize?
20 0.70625675 1854 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-13-A Structural Comparison of Conspicuous Consumption in China and the United States
topicId topicWeight
[(5, 0.01), (15, 0.027), (16, 0.056), (21, 0.034), (24, 0.104), (27, 0.014), (30, 0.153), (53, 0.015), (72, 0.014), (76, 0.011), (84, 0.014), (86, 0.019), (99, 0.34)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.98931932 1259 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-11-How things sound to us, versus how they sound to others
Introduction: Hykel Hosni noticed this bit from the Lindley Prize page of the Society for Bayesan Analysis: Lindley became a great missionary for the Bayesian gospel. The atmosphere of the Bayesian revival is captured in a comment by Rivett on Lindley’s move to University College London and the premier chair of statistics in Britain: “it was as though a Jehovah’s Witness had been elected Pope.” From my perspective, this was amusing (if commonplace): a group of rationalists jocularly characterizing themselves as religious fanatics. And some of this is in response to intense opposition from outsiders (see the Background section here ). That’s my view. I’m an insider, a statistician who’s heard all jokes about religious Bayesians, from Bayesian and non-Bayesian statisticians alike. But Hosni is an outsider, and here’s how he sees the above-quoted paragraph: Research, however, is not a matter of faith but a matter of arguments, which should always be evaluated with the utmost intellec
2 0.98407549 179 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-03-An Olympic size swimming pool full of lithium water
Introduction: As part of his continuing plan to sap etc etc., Aleks pointed me to an article by Max Miller reporting on a recommendation from Jacob Appel: Adding trace amounts of lithium to the drinking water could limit suicides. . . . Communities with higher than average amounts of lithium in their drinking water had significantly lower suicide rates than communities with lower levels. Regions of Texas with lower lithium concentrations had an average suicide rate of 14.2 per 100,000 people, whereas those areas with naturally higher lithium levels had a dramatically lower suicide rate of 8.7 per 100,000. The highest levels in Texas (150 micrograms of lithium per liter of water) are only a thousandth of the minimum pharmaceutical dose, and have no known deleterious effects. I don’t know anything about this and am offering no judgment on it; I’m just passing it on. The research studies are here and here . I am skeptical, though, about this part of the argument: We are not talking a
3 0.97847521 1623 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-14-GiveWell charity recommendations
Introduction: In a rare Christmas-themed post here, I pass along this note from Alexander Berger at GiveWell : We just published a blog post following up on the *other* famous piece of evidence for deworming, the Miguel and Kremer experiment from Kenya. They shared data and code from their working paper (!) follow-up finding that deworming increases incomes ten years later, and we came out of the re-analysis feeling more confident in, though not wholly convinced by, the results. We’ve also just released our new list of top charities for giving season this year, which I think might be a good fit for your audience. We wrote a blog post explaining our choices , and have also published extensive reviews of the top charities and the interventions on which they work. Perhaps the most interesting change since last year is the addition of GiveDirectly in the #2 spot; they do direct unconditional cash transfers to people living on less than a dollar a day in Kenya. We think it’s a remarkable mode
Introduction: Howard Wainer writes : When we focus only on the differences between groups, we too easily lose track of the big picture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current public discussions of the size of the gap in test scores that is observed between racial groups. It has been noted that in New Jersey the gap between the average scores of white and black students on the well-developed scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shrunk by only about 25 percent over the past two decades. The conclusion drawn was that even though the change is in the right direction, it is far too slow. But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one — 4th grade mathematics. . . . there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper g
5 0.97658503 1188 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-28-Reference on longitudinal models?
Introduction: Antonio Ramos writes: The book with Hill has very little on longitudinal models. So do you recommended any reference to complement your book on covariance structures typical from these models, such as AR(1), Antedependence, Factor Analytic, etc? I am very much interest in BUGS code for these basic models as well as how to extend them to more complex situations. My reply: There is a book by Banerjee, Carlin, and Gelfand on Bayesian space-time models. Beyond that, I think there is good work in psychometrics on covaraince structures but I don’t know the literature.
6 0.97420454 1768 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-18-Mertz’s reply to Unz’s response to Mertz’s comments on Unz’s article
7 0.973153 412 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-13-Time to apply for the hackNY summer fellows program
8 0.9647305 1195 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-04-Multiple comparisons dispute in the tabloids
same-blog 9 0.95946324 109 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-25-Classics of statistics
10 0.95891118 1831 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The Great Race
11 0.95536423 631 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-Explaining that plot.
12 0.95526659 1178 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-21-How many data points do you really have?
13 0.95420933 1416 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-14-Ripping off a ripoff
14 0.95289218 1497 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-15-Our blog makes connections!
15 0.94885123 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
16 0.94237393 1429 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-26-Our broken scholarly publishing system
17 0.9419359 2073 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-22-Ivy Jew update
18 0.93720818 852 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-13-Checking your model using fake data
19 0.93463492 2230 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-02-What is it with Americans in Olympic ski teams from tropical countries?
20 0.93332595 1936 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum