andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1708 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I remember in 4th grade or so, the teacher would give us a list of vocabulary words each week and we’d have to show we learned them by using each in a sentence. We quickly got bored and decided to do the assignment by writing a single sentence using all ten words. (Which the teacher hated, of course.) The above headline is in that spirit, combining blog posts rather than vocabulary words. But that only uses two of the entries. To really do the job, I’d need to throw in bivariate associations, ecological fallacies, high-dimensional feature selection, statistical significance, the suddenly unpopular name Hilary, snotty reviewers, the contagion of obesity, and milk-related spam. Or we could bring in some of the all-time favorites, such as Bayesians, economists, Finland, beautiful parents and their daughters, goofy graphics, red and blue states, essentialism in children’s reasoning, chess running, and zombies. Putting 8 of these in a single sentence (along with Glenn Hubbard
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1 I remember in 4th grade or so, the teacher would give us a list of vocabulary words each week and we’d have to show we learned them by using each in a sentence. [sent-1, score-0.735]
2 We quickly got bored and decided to do the assignment by writing a single sentence using all ten words. [sent-2, score-0.901]
3 ) The above headline is in that spirit, combining blog posts rather than vocabulary words. [sent-4, score-0.641]
4 To really do the job, I’d need to throw in bivariate associations, ecological fallacies, high-dimensional feature selection, statistical significance, the suddenly unpopular name Hilary, snotty reviewers, the contagion of obesity, and milk-related spam. [sent-6, score-1.076]
5 Or we could bring in some of the all-time favorites, such as Bayesians, economists, Finland, beautiful parents and their daughters, goofy graphics, red and blue states, essentialism in children’s reasoning, chess running, and zombies. [sent-7, score-0.811]
6 Putting 8 of these in a single sentence (along with Glenn Hubbard and Herbalife) still seems like a challenge. [sent-8, score-0.324]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1708 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-05-Wouldn’t it be cool if Glenn Hubbard were consulting for Herbalife and I were on the other side?
Introduction: I remember in 4th grade or so, the teacher would give us a list of vocabulary words each week and we’d have to show we learned them by using each in a sentence. We quickly got bored and decided to do the assignment by writing a single sentence using all ten words. (Which the teacher hated, of course.) The above headline is in that spirit, combining blog posts rather than vocabulary words. But that only uses two of the entries. To really do the job, I’d need to throw in bivariate associations, ecological fallacies, high-dimensional feature selection, statistical significance, the suddenly unpopular name Hilary, snotty reviewers, the contagion of obesity, and milk-related spam. Or we could bring in some of the all-time favorites, such as Bayesians, economists, Finland, beautiful parents and their daughters, goofy graphics, red and blue states, essentialism in children’s reasoning, chess running, and zombies. Putting 8 of these in a single sentence (along with Glenn Hubbard
2 0.12203419 2141 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-20-Don’t douthat, man! Please give this fallacy a name.
Introduction: Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m always on the lookout for new items for the lexicon . It’s been a good month on that front. In addition to the Garden of Forking Paths, I’ve encountered two entirely new (to me) fallacies. The first of the two new fallacies has a name that’s quite a mouthful; I’ll hold off on telling you about it right now, as Eric Loken and I are currently finishing a paper on it. Once the paper’s done, I’ll post it in the usual place (or here , once it is scheduled to be published) and I’ll add it to the lexicon as well. What I want to talk about today is a fallacy I noticed a couple days ago. I can’t think of a good name for it. And that’s where you, the readers, come in. Please give this fallacy a name! Here’s the story. The other day on the sister blog I reported on a pair of studies involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely
3 0.1192175 188 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Fake newspaper headlines
Introduction: I used this convenient site to create some images for a talk I’m preparing. (The competing headlines: “Beautiful parents have more daughters” vs. “No compelling evidence that beautiful parents are more or less likely to have daughters.” The latter gets cut off at “No compelling evidence that,” which actually works pretty well to demonstrate the sort of dull headline that would result if newspapers were to publish null results.)
4 0.11639389 1644 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-30-Fixed effects, followed by Bayes shrinkage?
Introduction: Stuart Buck writes: I have a question about fixed effects vs. random effects . Amongst economists who study teacher value-added, it has become common to see people saying that they estimated teacher fixed effects (via least squares dummy variables, so that there is a parameter for each teacher), but that they then applied empirical Bayes shrinkage so that the teacher effects are brought closer to the mean. (See this paper by Jacob and Lefgren, for example.) Can that really be what they are doing? Why wouldn’t they just run random (modeled) effects in the first place? I feel like there’s something I’m missing. My reply: I don’t know the full story here, but I’m thinking there are two goals, first to get an unbiased estimate of an overall treatment effect (and there the econometricians prefer so-called fixed effects; I disagree with them on this but I know where they’re coming from) and second to estimate individual teacher effects (and there it makes sense to use so-called
Introduction: Matt Taibbi writes : Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness . . . Hidden among the reams of material recently filed in connection with the lawsuit of monoline insurer MBIA against Bank of America and Countrywide is a deposition of none other than Columbia University’s Glenn Hubbard. . . . Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting. That’s interesting, because I worked on the other side of this case! I was hired by MBIA’s lawyers. It wouldn’t be polite of me to reveal my consulting rate, and I never actually got depose
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same-blog 1 0.95028311 1708 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-05-Wouldn’t it be cool if Glenn Hubbard were consulting for Herbalife and I were on the other side?
Introduction: I remember in 4th grade or so, the teacher would give us a list of vocabulary words each week and we’d have to show we learned them by using each in a sentence. We quickly got bored and decided to do the assignment by writing a single sentence using all ten words. (Which the teacher hated, of course.) The above headline is in that spirit, combining blog posts rather than vocabulary words. But that only uses two of the entries. To really do the job, I’d need to throw in bivariate associations, ecological fallacies, high-dimensional feature selection, statistical significance, the suddenly unpopular name Hilary, snotty reviewers, the contagion of obesity, and milk-related spam. Or we could bring in some of the all-time favorites, such as Bayesians, economists, Finland, beautiful parents and their daughters, goofy graphics, red and blue states, essentialism in children’s reasoning, chess running, and zombies. Putting 8 of these in a single sentence (along with Glenn Hubbard
2 0.63325632 615 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-16-Chess vs. checkers
Introduction: Mark Palko writes : Chess derives most of its complexity through differentiated pieces; with checkers the complexity comes from the interaction between pieces. The result is a series of elegant graph problems where the viable paths change with each move of your opponent. To draw an analogy with chess, imagine if moving your knight could allow your opponent’s bishop to move like a rook. Add to that the potential for traps and manipulation that come with forced capture and you have one of the most remarkable games of all time. . . . It’s not unusual to hear masters of both chess and checkers (draughts) to admit that they prefer the latter. So why does chess get all the respect? Why do you never see a criminal mastermind or a Bond villain playing in a checkers tournament? Part of the problem is that we learn the game as children so we tend to think of it as a children’s game. We focus on how simple the rules are and miss how much complexity and subtlety you can get out of those ru
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
4 0.62605202 1082 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-25-Further evidence of a longstanding principle of statistics
Introduction: The principle is, Whatever you do, somebody in psychometrics already did it long before. The new evidence comes from an article by Lawrence Hubert and Howard Wainer: There are several issues with the use of ecological correlations: They tend to be a lot higher than individual-level correlations, and assuming what is seen at the group level also holds at the level of the individual is so pernicious, it has been labeled the “ecological fallacy” by Selvin (1958). The term ecological correlation was popularized from a 1950 article by William Robinson (Robinson, 1950), but the idea has been around for some time (e.g., see the 1939 article by E. L. Thorndike, On the Fallacy of Imputing Correlations Found for Groups to the Individuals or Smaller Groups Composing Them).
5 0.60820073 1818 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-22-Goal: Rules for Turing chess
Introduction: Daniel Murell has more thoughts on Turing chess (last discussed here ): When I played with my brother, we had it that if you managed to lap someone while running around the house, then you got an additional move. This means that if you had the option to take the king on your additional move, you could, and doing so won you the game. He was fitter at the time so he slipped in two additional moves over the course of the game. I still won :) I am much better at him at chess though, so I’m sure he would have beaten me had we been more even. W.r.t. dsquared’s comment and your response, I’m not overly concerned about the first move, because you can enforce that white must reach a halfway point or that some time interval elapse before black makes his first move. This version though does have one significant weakness that is evident to me. If you wait a little for your opponent to return to make his second move in a row against you, you get your breath back. He couldn’t plan for th
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1 0.94435233 1215 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-16-The “hot hand” and problems with hypothesis testing
Introduction: Gur Yaari writes : Anyone who has ever watched a sports competition is familiar with expressions like “on fire”, “in the zone”, “on a roll”, “momentum” and so on. But what do these expressions really mean? In 1985 when Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky studied this phenomenon for the first time, they defined it as: “. . . these phrases express a belief that the performance of a player during a particular period is significantly better than expected on the basis of the player’s overall record”. Their conclusion was that what people tend to perceive as a “hot hand” is essentially a cognitive illusion caused by a misperception of random sequences. Until recently there was little, if any, evidence to rule out their conclusion. Increased computing power and new data availability from various sports now provide surprising evidence of this phenomenon, thus reigniting the debate. Yaari goes on to some studies that have found time dependence in basketball, baseball, voll
2 0.94342273 1160 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-09-Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests
Introduction: When I spoke at Princeton last year, I talked with neuroscientist Sam Wang, who told me about a project he did surveying incoming Princeton freshmen about mental illness in their families. He and his coauthor Benjamin Campbell found some interesting results, which they just published : A link between intellect and temperament has long been the subject of speculation. . . . Studies of the artistically inclined report linkage with familial depression, while among eminent and creative scientists, a lower incidence of affective disorders is found. In the case of developmental disorders, a heightened prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been found in the families of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. . . . We surveyed the incoming class of 2014 at Princeton University about their intended academic major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic variables. . . . Consistent with prior findings, we noticed a relation between intended academ
3 0.94305646 1477 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-30-Visualizing Distributions of Covariance Matrices
Introduction: Since we’ve been discussing prior distributions on covariance matrices, I will recommend this recent article (coauthored with Tomoki Tokuda, Ben Goodrich, Iven Van Mechelen, and Francis Tuerlinckx) on their visualization: We present some methods for graphing distributions of covariance matrices and demonstrate them on several models, including the Wishart, inverse-Wishart, and scaled inverse-Wishart families in different dimensions. Our visualizations follow the principle of decomposing a covariance matrix into scale parameters and correlations, pulling out marginal summaries where possible and using two and three-dimensional plots to reveal multivariate structure. Visualizing a distribution of covariance matrices is a step beyond visualizing a single covariance matrix or a single multivariate dataset. Our visualization methods are available through the R package VisCov.
same-blog 4 0.94002748 1708 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-05-Wouldn’t it be cool if Glenn Hubbard were consulting for Herbalife and I were on the other side?
Introduction: I remember in 4th grade or so, the teacher would give us a list of vocabulary words each week and we’d have to show we learned them by using each in a sentence. We quickly got bored and decided to do the assignment by writing a single sentence using all ten words. (Which the teacher hated, of course.) The above headline is in that spirit, combining blog posts rather than vocabulary words. But that only uses two of the entries. To really do the job, I’d need to throw in bivariate associations, ecological fallacies, high-dimensional feature selection, statistical significance, the suddenly unpopular name Hilary, snotty reviewers, the contagion of obesity, and milk-related spam. Or we could bring in some of the all-time favorites, such as Bayesians, economists, Finland, beautiful parents and their daughters, goofy graphics, red and blue states, essentialism in children’s reasoning, chess running, and zombies. Putting 8 of these in a single sentence (along with Glenn Hubbard
5 0.93015122 2243 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-11-The myth of the myth of the myth of the hot hand
Introduction: Phil pointed me to this paper so I thought I probably better repeat what I wrote a couple years ago: 1. The effects are certainly not zero. We are not machines, and anything that can affect our expectations (for example, our success in previous tries) should affect our performance. 2. The effects I’ve seen are small, on the order of 2 percentage points (for example, the probability of a success in some sports task might be 45% if you’re “hot” and 43% otherwise). 3. There’s a huge amount of variation, not just between but also among players. Sometimes if you succeed you will stay relaxed and focused, other times you can succeed and get overconfidence. 4. Whatever the latest results on particular sports, I can’t see anyone overturning the basic finding of Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky that players and spectators alike will perceive the hot hand even when it does not exist and dramatically overestimate the magnitude and consistency of any hot-hand phenomenon that does exist.
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