andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-150 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Gary Gates writes the following in response to the discussion of my recent blog on the difficulty of using “gaydar” to estimate the frequencies of gays in a population: First, here’s a better (I think, anyway) method than using AIDS deaths from the NY Times (yikes!) to estimate the % of the military that is gay or lesbian. Gates estimates 2.2%, with, unsurprisingly, a higher rate among women than men. He continues: Here’s a tale of the false positive problem affecting who gets counted as same-sex couples in the Census and attached is a working paper that updates those analyses (with better methods, I think) using ACS data. In this paper, Gates (along with Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor) finds: Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples. 40% misclassification. Wow.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Gary Gates writes the following in response to the discussion of my recent blog on the difficulty of using “gaydar” to estimate the frequencies of gays in a population: First, here’s a better (I think, anyway) method than using AIDS deaths from the NY Times (yikes! [sent-1, score-1.063]
2 ) to estimate the % of the military that is gay or lesbian. [sent-2, score-0.335]
3 2%, with, unsurprisingly, a higher rate among women than men. [sent-4, score-0.301]
4 He continues: Here’s a tale of the false positive problem affecting who gets counted as same-sex couples in the Census and attached is a working paper that updates those analyses (with better methods, I think) using ACS data. [sent-5, score-1.568]
5 In this paper, Gates (along with Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor) finds: Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U. [sent-6, score-0.485]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
Introduction: Gary Gates writes the following in response to the discussion of my recent blog on the difficulty of using “gaydar” to estimate the frequencies of gays in a population: First, here’s a better (I think, anyway) method than using AIDS deaths from the NY Times (yikes!) to estimate the % of the military that is gay or lesbian. Gates estimates 2.2%, with, unsurprisingly, a higher rate among women than men. He continues: Here’s a tale of the false positive problem affecting who gets counted as same-sex couples in the Census and attached is a working paper that updates those analyses (with better methods, I think) using ACS data. In this paper, Gates (along with Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor) finds: Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples. 40% misclassification. Wow.
2 0.19119811 1320 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-14-Question 4 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
Introduction: 4. Researchers have found that survey respondents overreport church attendance. Thus, naive estimates from surveys overstate the percentage of Americans who attend church regularly. Does this have a large impact on estimates of time trends in religious attendance? Solution to question 3 From yesterday : 3. We discussed in class the best currently available method for estimating the proportion of military servicemembers who are gay. What is that method? (Recall the problems with the direct approach: there is no simple way to survey servicemembers at random, nor is it likely that they would answer such a question honestly.) Solution: I was talking about the work of Gary Gates, combining an estimate of the percentage of gays in the population with an estimate of the probability that someone is in the military, given that he or she is gay.
3 0.12340862 944 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-05-How accurate is your gaydar?
Introduction: Sanjay Srivastava reports : In a typical study, half of the targets are gay/lesbian and half are straight, so a purely random guesser (i.e., someone with no gaydar) would be around 50%. The reported accuracy rates in the articles . . . say that people guess correctly about 65% of the time. . . . Let’s assume that the 65% accuracy rate is symmetric — that guessers are just as good at correctly identifying gays/lesbians as they are in identifying straight people. Let’s also assume that 5% of people are actually gay/lesbian. From those numbers, a quick calculation tells us that for a randomly-selected member of the population, if your gaydar says “GAY” there is a 9% chance that you are right. Eerily accurate? Not so much. If you rely too much on your gaydar, you are going to make a lot of dumb mistakes. . . . It’s the classic problem of combining direct evidence with base rates.
4 0.12135904 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
Introduction: I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years; see here , for example. At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psych
5 0.11528709 730 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-25-Rechecking the census
Introduction: Sam Roberts writes : The Census Bureau [reported] that though New York City’s population reached a record high of 8,175,133 in 2010, the gain of 2 percent, or 166,855 people, since 2000 fell about 200,000 short of what the bureau itself had estimated. Public officials were incredulous that a city that lures tens of thousands of immigrants each year and where a forest of new buildings has sprouted could really have recorded such a puny increase. How, they wondered, could Queens have grown by only one-tenth of 1 percent since 2000? How, even with a surge in foreclosures, could the number of vacant apartments have soared by nearly 60 percent in Queens and by 66 percent in Brooklyn? That does seem a bit suspicious. So the newspaper did its own survey: Now, a house-to-house New York Times survey of three representative square blocks where the Census Bureau said vacancies had increased and the population had declined since 2000 suggests that the city’s outrage is somewhat ju
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14 0.078150965 1978 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-12-Fixing the race, ethnicity, and national origin questions on the U.S. Census
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19 0.067880079 69 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-04-A Wikipedia whitewash
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same-blog 1 0.9411943 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
Introduction: Gary Gates writes the following in response to the discussion of my recent blog on the difficulty of using “gaydar” to estimate the frequencies of gays in a population: First, here’s a better (I think, anyway) method than using AIDS deaths from the NY Times (yikes!) to estimate the % of the military that is gay or lesbian. Gates estimates 2.2%, with, unsurprisingly, a higher rate among women than men. He continues: Here’s a tale of the false positive problem affecting who gets counted as same-sex couples in the Census and attached is a working paper that updates those analyses (with better methods, I think) using ACS data. In this paper, Gates (along with Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor) finds: Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples. 40% misclassification. Wow.
Introduction: Mike Spagat sends in an interesting explanation for the noted problems with conflict mortality studies (a topic we’ve discussed on occasion on this blog). Spagat writes: This analysis is based on the fact that conflict violence does not spread out at all uniformly across a map but, rather, tends to concentrate in a few areas. This means that small, headline-grabbing violence surveys are extremely unreliable. There is a second point, based on the work of David Hemenway which you’ve also cited on your blog. Even within exceptionally violent environments most households will still not have a violent death. So a very small false positive rate in a household survey will cause substantial upward bias in violence estimates.
Introduction: Earlier today, Nate criticized a U.S. military survey that asks troops the question, “Do you currently serve with a male or female Service member you believe to be homosexual.” [emphasis added] As Nate points out, by asking this question in such a speculative way, “it would seem that you’ll be picking up a tremendous number of false positives–soldiers who are believed to be gay, but aren’t–and that these false positives will swamp any instances in which soldiers (in spite of DADT) are actually somewhat open about their same-sex attractions.” This is a general problem in survey research. In an article in Chance magazine in 1997, “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun uses: a case study of survey overestimates of rare events” [see here for related references], David Hemenway uses the false-positive, false-negative reasoning to explain this bias in terms of probability theory. Misclassifications that induce seemingly minor biases in estimates of certain small probab
4 0.70643532 12 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-More on problems with surveys estimating deaths in war zones
Introduction: Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. Our responses to the debate were posted on our website last week. “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. We also argued that deaths from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition had declined. (The exec. summary is here .) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries w
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Introduction: Sam Roberts writes : The Census Bureau [reported] that though New York City’s population reached a record high of 8,175,133 in 2010, the gain of 2 percent, or 166,855 people, since 2000 fell about 200,000 short of what the bureau itself had estimated. Public officials were incredulous that a city that lures tens of thousands of immigrants each year and where a forest of new buildings has sprouted could really have recorded such a puny increase. How, they wondered, could Queens have grown by only one-tenth of 1 percent since 2000? How, even with a surge in foreclosures, could the number of vacant apartments have soared by nearly 60 percent in Queens and by 66 percent in Brooklyn? That does seem a bit suspicious. So the newspaper did its own survey: Now, a house-to-house New York Times survey of three representative square blocks where the Census Bureau said vacancies had increased and the population had declined since 2000 suggests that the city’s outrage is somewhat ju
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Introduction: Marc Tanguay writes in with a specific question that has a very general answer. First, the question: I [Tanguay] am currently running a MCMC for which I have 3 parameters that are restricted to a specific space. 2 are bounded between 0 and 1 while the third is binary and updated by a Beta-Binomial. Since my priors are also bounded, I notice that, conditional on All the rest (which covers both data and other parameters), the density was not varying a lot within the space of the parameters. As a result, the acceptance rate is high, about 85%, and this despite the fact that all the parameter’s space is explore. Since in your book, the optimal acceptance rates prescribed are lower that 50% (in case of multiple parameters), do you think I should worry about getting 85%. Or is this normal given the restrictions on the parameters? First off: Yes, my guess is that you should be taking bigger jumps. 85% seems like too high an acceptance rate for Metropolis jumping. More generally, t
same-blog 2 0.90985966 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
Introduction: Gary Gates writes the following in response to the discussion of my recent blog on the difficulty of using “gaydar” to estimate the frequencies of gays in a population: First, here’s a better (I think, anyway) method than using AIDS deaths from the NY Times (yikes!) to estimate the % of the military that is gay or lesbian. Gates estimates 2.2%, with, unsurprisingly, a higher rate among women than men. He continues: Here’s a tale of the false positive problem affecting who gets counted as same-sex couples in the Census and attached is a working paper that updates those analyses (with better methods, I think) using ACS data. In this paper, Gates (along with Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor) finds: Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples. 40% misclassification. Wow.
3 0.88964772 221 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-21-Busted!
Introduction: I’m just glad that universities don’t sanction professors for publishing false theorems. If the guy really is nailed by the feds for fraud, I hope they don’t throw him in prison. In general, prison time seems like a brutal, expensive, and inefficient way to punish people. I’d prefer if the government just took 95% of his salary for several years, made him do community service (cleaning equipment at the local sewage treatment plant, perhaps; a lab scientist should be good at this sort of thing, no?), etc. If restriction of this dude’s personal freedom is judged be part of the sentence, he could be given some sort of electronic tag that would send a message to the police if he were ever more than 3 miles from his home. But no need to bill the taxpayers for the cost of keeping him in prison.
4 0.88794053 1710 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-06-The new Stan 1.1.1, featuring Gaussian processes!
Introduction: We just released Stan 1.1.1 and RStan 1.1.1 As usual, you can find download and install instructions at: http://mc-stan.org/ This is a patch release and is fully backward compatible with Stan and RStan 1.1.0. The main thing you should notice is that the multivariate models should be much faster and all the bugs reported for 1.1.0 have been fixed. We’ve also added a bit more functionality. The substantial changes are listed in the following release notes. v1.1.1 (5 February 2012) ====================================================================== Bug Fixes ———————————- * fixed bug in comparison operators, which swapped operator< with operator<= and swapped operator> with operator>= semantics * auto-initialize all variables to prevent segfaults * atan2 gradient propagation fixed * fixed off-by-one in NUTS treedepth bound so NUTS goes at most to specified tree depth rather than specified depth + 1 * various compiler compatibility and minor consistency issues * f
5 0.88256437 1638 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-25-Diving chess
Introduction: Knowing of my interest in Turing run-around-the-house chess , David Lockhart points me to this : Diving Chess is a chess variant, which is played in a swimming pool. Instead of using chess clocks, each player must submerge themselves underwater during their turn, only to resurface when they are ready to make a move. Players must make a move within 5 seconds of resurfacing (they will receive a warning if not, and three warnings will result in a forfeit). Diving Chess was invented by American Chess Master Etan Ilfeld; the very first exhibition game took place between Ilfeld and former British Chess Champion William Hartston at the Thirdspace gym in Soho on August 2nd, 2011. Hartston won the match which lasted almost two hours such that each player was underwater for an entire hour.
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