andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1662 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Commenter Rahul asked what I thought of this note by Scott Firestone ( link from Tyler Cowen) criticizing a recent discussion by Kevin Drum suggesting that lead exposure causes violent crime. Firestone writes: It turns out there was in fact a prospective study done—but its implications for Drum’s argument are mixed. The study was a cohort study done by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. Between 1979 and 1984, 376 infants were recruited. Their parents consented to have lead levels in their blood tested over time; this was matched with records over subsequent decades of the individuals’ arrest records, and specifically arrest for violent crime. Ultimately, some of these individuals were dropped from the study; by the end, 250 were selected for the results. The researchers found that for each increase of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, there was a higher risk for being arrested for a violent crime, but a further look at the numbers shows a more mixe
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1 Commenter Rahul asked what I thought of this note by Scott Firestone ( link from Tyler Cowen) criticizing a recent discussion by Kevin Drum suggesting that lead exposure causes violent crime. [sent-1, score-0.635]
2 Firestone writes: It turns out there was in fact a prospective study done—but its implications for Drum’s argument are mixed. [sent-2, score-0.205]
3 The study was a cohort study done by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. [sent-3, score-0.525]
4 Their parents consented to have lead levels in their blood tested over time; this was matched with records over subsequent decades of the individuals’ arrest records, and specifically arrest for violent crime. [sent-5, score-1.374]
5 Ultimately, some of these individuals were dropped from the study; by the end, 250 were selected for the results. [sent-6, score-0.159]
6 The researchers found that for each increase of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, there was a higher risk for being arrested for a violent crime, but a further look at the numbers shows a more mixed picture than they let on. [sent-7, score-1.029]
7 In prenatal blood lead, this effect was not significant. [sent-8, score-0.399]
8 If these infants were to have no additional risk over the median exposure level among all prenatal infants, the ratio would be 1. [sent-9, score-1.08]
9 They found that for their cohort, the risk ratio was 1. [sent-11, score-0.294]
10 However, the sample size was small enough that the confidence interval dipped as low as 0. [sent-13, score-0.415]
11 88 (paradoxically indicating that additional 5 µg/dl during this period of development would actually be protective), and rose as high as 2. [sent-14, score-0.228]
12 30, but the sample size was higher, leading to a tighter confidence interval of 1. [sent-18, score-0.511]
13 This range indicates it’s possible that the effect is as little as a 3% increase in violent crime arrests, but this is still statistically significant. [sent-21, score-0.6]
14 I have not followed this at all and have no comments on the substance of the matter. [sent-22, score-0.122]
15 But based on Firestone’s piece linked above, I am not impressed by his statistical criticisms. [sent-23, score-0.058]
16 He seemed to just be going around looking for subsets of the data with statistically insignificant results. [sent-24, score-0.272]
17 With a small sample size, not every comparison is going to be statistically significant. [sent-25, score-0.216]
18 Firestone comments , explaining that his goal is not to shoot down the claim but rather to point out areas of uncertainty which should motivate further study. [sent-29, score-0.188]
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Introduction: Commenter Rahul asked what I thought of this note by Scott Firestone ( link from Tyler Cowen) criticizing a recent discussion by Kevin Drum suggesting that lead exposure causes violent crime. Firestone writes: It turns out there was in fact a prospective study done—but its implications for Drum’s argument are mixed. The study was a cohort study done by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. Between 1979 and 1984, 376 infants were recruited. Their parents consented to have lead levels in their blood tested over time; this was matched with records over subsequent decades of the individuals’ arrest records, and specifically arrest for violent crime. Ultimately, some of these individuals were dropped from the study; by the end, 250 were selected for the results. The researchers found that for each increase of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, there was a higher risk for being arrested for a violent crime, but a further look at the numbers shows a more mixe
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
Introduction: Sanjay Kaul writes: I am sure you must be aware of the recent controversy ignited by the 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Cholesterol Treatment Guidelines that were released last month. They have been the subject of several newspaper articles and blogs , most of them missing the thrust of the guidelines. There is much to admire about these guidelines as they are more faithfully aligned with high-quality ‘actionable’ evidence than the 3 previous iterations. However, the controversy is focused on the performance of the risk calculator introduced for initiating treatment in individuals without established atherosclerotic disease or diabetes (so-called primary prevention cohort). The guidelines recommend statins for primary prevention in individuals who have a 10-year risk estimated to be 7.5%. The risk calculator was derived from population cohorts studied in the 1990s. The discrimination for predicting the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular events
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Introduction: I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the term “confidence interval,” for several reasons: - The well-known difficulties in interpretation (officially the confidence statement can be interpreted only on average, but people typically implicitly give the Bayesian interpretation to each case), - The ambiguity between confidence intervals and predictive intervals. (See the footnote in BDA where we discuss the difference between “inference” and “prediction” in the classical framework.) - The awkwardness of explaining that confidence intervals are big in noisy situations where you have less confidence, and confidence intervals are small when you have more confidence. So here’s my proposal. Let’s use the term “uncertainty interval” instead. The uncertainty interval tells you how much uncertainty you have. That works pretty well, I think. P.S. As of this writing, “confidence interval” outGoogles “uncertainty interval” by the huge margin of 9.5 million to 54000. So we
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Introduction: Commenter Rahul asked what I thought of this note by Scott Firestone ( link from Tyler Cowen) criticizing a recent discussion by Kevin Drum suggesting that lead exposure causes violent crime. Firestone writes: It turns out there was in fact a prospective study done—but its implications for Drum’s argument are mixed. The study was a cohort study done by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. Between 1979 and 1984, 376 infants were recruited. Their parents consented to have lead levels in their blood tested over time; this was matched with records over subsequent decades of the individuals’ arrest records, and specifically arrest for violent crime. Ultimately, some of these individuals were dropped from the study; by the end, 250 were selected for the results. The researchers found that for each increase of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, there was a higher risk for being arrested for a violent crime, but a further look at the numbers shows a more mixe
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Introduction: Thomas Lumley writes : The Herald has a story about hazards of coffee. The picture caption says Men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die. which is obviously not true: deaths, as we’ve observed before, are fixed at one per customer. The story says It’s not that people are dying at a rapid rate. But men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die and women have double the chance compared with moderate drinkers, according to the The University of Queensland and the University of South Carolina study. What the study actually reported was rates of death: over an average of 17 years, men who drink more than four cups a day died at about a 21% higher rate, with little evidence of any difference in men. After they considered only men and women under 55 (which they don’t say was something they had planned to do), and attempted to control for a whole bunch of other factors, the rate increase went to 56% for me
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Introduction: Philip Jones writes: As an interested reader of your blog, I wondered if you might consider a blog entry sometime on the following question I posed on CrossValidated (StackExchange). I originally posed the question based on my uncertainty about 95% CIs: “Are all values within the 95% CI equally likely (probable), or are the values at the “tails” of the 95% CI less likely than those in the middle of the CI closer to the point estimate?” I posed this question based on discordant information I found at a couple of different web sources (I posted these sources in the body of the question). I received some interesting replies, and the replies were not unanimous, in fact there is some serious disagreement there! After seeing this disagreement, I naturally thought of you, and whether you might be able to clear this up. Please note I am not referring to credible intervals, but rather to the common medical journal reporting standard of confidence intervals. My response: First
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