andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1389 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Larry Wasserman, a leading theoretical statistician and generally thoughtful guy, has started a blog on . . . theoretical statistics! Good stuff, and readers of this blog should enjoy the different perspective that Larry offers. Here are some earlier references to Larry on this blog, and here’s a discussion that gives a sense of our different (but not extremely different) attitudes about statistical methods.
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same-blog 1 1.0 1389 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-23-Larry Wasserman’s statistics blog
Introduction: Larry Wasserman, a leading theoretical statistician and generally thoughtful guy, has started a blog on . . . theoretical statistics! Good stuff, and readers of this blog should enjoy the different perspective that Larry offers. Here are some earlier references to Larry on this blog, and here’s a discussion that gives a sense of our different (but not extremely different) attitudes about statistical methods.
2 0.31744811 1165 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-13-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Wasserman
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: Larry Wasserman, “Low Assumptions, High Dimensions”: This article was refreshing to me because it was so different from anything I’ve seen before. Larry works in a statistics department and I work in a statistics department but there’s so little overlap in what we do. Larry and I both work in high dimesions (maybe his dimensions are higher than mine, but a few thousand dimensions seems like a lot to me!), but there the similarity ends. His article is all about using few to no assumptions, while I use assumptions all the time. Here’s an example. Larry writes: P. Laurie Davies (and his co-workers) have written several interesting papers where probability models, at least in the sense that we usually use them, are eliminated. Data are treated as deterministic. One then looks for adequate models rather than true mode
Introduction: Leading theoretical statistician Larry Wassserman in 2008 : Some of the greatest contributions of statistics to science involve adding additional randomness and leveraging that randomness. Examples are randomized experiments, permutation tests, cross-validation and data-splitting. These are unabashedly frequentist ideas and, while one can strain to fit them into a Bayesian framework, they don’t really have a place in Bayesian inference. The fact that Bayesian methods do not naturally accommodate such a powerful set of statistical ideas seems like a serious deficiency. To which I responded on the second-to-last paragraph of page 8 here . Larry Wasserman in 2013 : Some people say that there is no role for randomization in Bayesian inference. In other words, the randomization mechanism plays no role in Bayes’ theorem. But this is not really true. Without randomization, we can indeed derive a posterior for theta but it is highly sensitive to the prior. This is just a restat
4 0.23093338 1560 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-03-Statistical methods that work in some settings but not others
Introduction: David Hogg pointed me to this post by Larry Wasserman: 1. The Horwitz-Thompson estimator satisfies the following condition: for every , where — the parameter space — is the set of all functions . (There are practical improvements to the Horwitz-Thompson estimator that we discussed in our earlier posts but we won’t revisit those here.) 2. A Bayes estimator requires a prior for . In general, if is not a function of then (1) will not hold. . . . 3. If you let be a function if , (1) still, in general, does not hold. 4. If you make a function if in just the right way, then (1) will hold. . . . There is nothing wrong with doing this, but in our opinion this is not in the spirit of Bayesian inference. . . . 7. This example is only meant to show that Bayesian estimators do not necessarily have good frequentist properties. This should not be surprising. There is no reason why we should in general expect a Bayesian method to have a frequentist property
5 0.21762681 1273 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-20-Proposals for alternative review systems for scientific work
Introduction: I recently became aware of two new entries in the ever-popular genre of, Our Peer-Review System is in Trouble; How Can We Fix It? Political scientist Brendan Nyhan, commenting on experimental and empirical sciences more generally, focuses on the selection problem that positive rather then negative findings tend to get published, leading via the statistical significance filter to an overestimation of effect sizes. Nyhan recommends that data-collection protocols be published ahead of time, with the commitment to publish the eventual results: In the case of experimental data, a better practice would be for journals to accept articles before the study was conducted. The article should be written up to the point of the results section, which would then be populated using a pre-specified analysis plan submitted by the author. The journal would then allow for post-hoc analysis and interpretation by the author that would be labeled as such and distinguished from the previously submit
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same-blog 1 0.97201246 1389 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-23-Larry Wasserman’s statistics blog
Introduction: Larry Wasserman, a leading theoretical statistician and generally thoughtful guy, has started a blog on . . . theoretical statistics! Good stuff, and readers of this blog should enjoy the different perspective that Larry offers. Here are some earlier references to Larry on this blog, and here’s a discussion that gives a sense of our different (but not extremely different) attitudes about statistical methods.
2 0.67521232 890 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-05-Error statistics
Introduction: New blog from the philosopher Deborah Mayo who I think agrees with me about many statistical issues although from a non-Bayesian perspective. But I disagree with her when she writes that certain criticisms of frequentist statistical methods “keep popping up (verbatim) in every Bayesian textbook and article on philosophical foundations.” I’ve written a couple of Bayesian textbooks and some articles on philosophical foundations, and I don’t think I do this! That said, I think Mayo has a lot to say, so I wouldn’t judge her whole blog (let alone her published work) based on that one intemperate statement.
3 0.62333637 91 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-16-RSS mess
Introduction: Apparently some of our new blog entries are appearing as old entries on the RSS feed, meaning that those of you who read the blog using RSS may be missing a lot of good stuff. We’re working on this. But, in the meantime, I recommend you click on the blog itself to see what’s been posted in the last few weeks. Enjoy.
4 0.60874534 738 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Works well versus well understood
Introduction: John Cook discusses the John Tukey quote, “The test of a good procedure is how well it works, not how well it is understood.” Cook writes: At some level, it’s hard to argue against this. Statistical procedures operate on empirical data, so it makes sense that the procedures themselves be evaluated empirically. But I [Cook] question whether we really know that a statistical procedure works well if it isn’t well understood. Specifically, I’m skeptical of complex statistical methods whose only credentials are a handful of simulations. “We don’t have any theoretical results, buy hey, it works well in practice. Just look at the simulations.” Every method works well on the scenarios its author publishes, almost by definition. If the method didn’t handle a scenario well, the author would publish a different scenario. I agree with Cook but would give a slightly different emphasis. I’d say that a lot of methods can work when they are done well. See the second meta-principle liste
5 0.60700202 1859 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-16-How do we choose our default methods?
Introduction: I was asked to write an article for the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) 50th anniversary volume. Here it is (it’s labeled as “Chapter 1,” which isn’t right; that’s just what came out when I used the template that was supplied). The article begins as follows: The field of statistics continues to be divided into competing schools of thought. In theory one might imagine choosing the uniquely best method for each problem as it arises, but in practice we choose for ourselves (and recom- mend to others) default principles, models, and methods to be used in a wide variety of settings. This article briefly considers the informal criteria we use to decide what methods to use and what principles to apply in statistics problems. And then I follow up with these sections: Statistics: the science of defaults Ways of knowing The pluralist’s dilemma And here’s the concluding paragraph: Statistics is a young science in which progress is being made in many
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same-blog 1 0.98859119 1389 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-23-Larry Wasserman’s statistics blog
Introduction: Larry Wasserman, a leading theoretical statistician and generally thoughtful guy, has started a blog on . . . theoretical statistics! Good stuff, and readers of this blog should enjoy the different perspective that Larry offers. Here are some earlier references to Larry on this blog, and here’s a discussion that gives a sense of our different (but not extremely different) attitudes about statistical methods.
2 0.98395377 1385 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-20-Reconciling different claims about working-class voters
Introduction: After our discussions of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s opinions about working-class voters (see here and here ), a question arose on how to reconcile the analyses of Alan Abramowitz and Tom Edsall (showing an increase in Republican voting among low-education working white southerners), with Larry Bartels’s finding that “there has been no discernible trend in presidential voting behavior among the ‘working white working class.’” Here is my resolution: All the statistics that have been posted seem reasonable to me. Also relevant to the discussion, I believe, are Figures 3.1, 4.2b, 10.1, and 10.2 of Red State Blue State. In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes
3 0.98060971 1678 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-17-Wanted: 365 stories of statistics
Introduction: The American Statistical Association has a blog called the Statistics Forum that I edit but haven’t been doing much with. Originally I thought we’d get a bunch of bloggers and have a topic each week or each month and get discussions from lots of perspectives. But it was hard to get people to keep contributing, and the blog+comments approach didn’t seem to be working as a way to get wide-ranging discussion. I did organize a good roundtable discussion at one point, but it took a lot of work on my part. Recently I had another idea for the blog, based on something that Kaiser Fung wrote on three hours in the life of a statistician , along with a similar (if a bit more impressionistic) piece I wrote awhile back describing my experiences on a typical workday. So here’s the plan. 365 of you write vignettes about your statistical lives. Get into the nitty gritty—tell me what you do, and why you’re doing it. I’ll collect these and then post them at the Statistics Forum, one a day
4 0.9799124 371 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-26-Musical chairs in econ journals
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to a paper by Bruno Frey on the lack of space for articles in economics journals. Frey writes: To further their careers, [academic economists] are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few slots open in such journals. Such academic competition maybe useful to generate hard work, however, there may be serious negative consequences: the wrong output may be produced in an inefficient way, the wrong people may be selected, and losers may react in a harmful way. According to Frey, the consensus is that there are only five top economics journals–and one of those five is Econometrica, which is so specialized that I’d say that, for most academic economists, there are only four top places they can publish. The difficulty is that demand for these slots outpaces supply: for example, in 2007 there were only 275 articles in all these journals combined (or 224 if you exclude Econometrica), while “a rough estim
Introduction: Jeff Leek points to a post by Alex Holcombe, who disputes the idea that science is self-correcting. Holcombe writes [scroll down to get to his part]: The pace of scientific production has quickened, and self-correction has suffered. Findings that might correct old results are considered less interesting than results from more original research questions. Potential corrections are also more contested. As the competition for space in prestigious journals has become increasingly frenzied, doing and publishing studies that would confirm the rapidly accumulating new discoveries, or would correct them, became a losing proposition. Holcombe picks up on some points that we’ve discussed a lot here in the past year. Here’s Holcombe: In certain subfields, almost all new work appears in only a very few journals, all associated with a single professional society. There is then no way around the senior gatekeepers, who may then suppress corrections with impunity. . . . The bias agai
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