andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1893 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Aurelian Muntean writes: I have read an article on NPR and the journal article that spun this news. What draw my attention was the discussion in terms of causation implied by one of the authors of the article interviewed in the NPR news, and also by the conclusions of the article itself claiming large effects. Although the total sample (self-selecting pregnant women) seems very large (85,176) the subsamples (270 out of which 114 were in the sub-subsample revealing statistically significant association) used to support the analysis seem to be too small. Or not? My response: The different sources of information do seem to be in some conflict: - The JAMA article reports the autism rate of 1 per 1000 for children of mothers taking folic acid and 2 per 1000 for children of mothers not taking folic acid. (They also report the adjusted odds ratio as 0.6 rather than 0.5, indicted that the two groups differ a bit in some background variables.) - The NPR article has this q
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Aurelian Muntean writes: I have read an article on NPR and the journal article that spun this news. [sent-1, score-0.362]
2 What draw my attention was the discussion in terms of causation implied by one of the authors of the article interviewed in the NPR news, and also by the conclusions of the article itself claiming large effects. [sent-2, score-0.636]
3 Although the total sample (self-selecting pregnant women) seems very large (85,176) the subsamples (270 out of which 114 were in the sub-subsample revealing statistically significant association) used to support the analysis seem to be too small. [sent-3, score-0.416]
4 My response: The different sources of information do seem to be in some conflict: - The JAMA article reports the autism rate of 1 per 1000 for children of mothers taking folic acid and 2 per 1000 for children of mothers not taking folic acid. [sent-5, score-1.976]
5 5, indicted that the two groups differ a bit in some background variables. [sent-8, score-0.128]
6 ) - The NPR article has this quote: “‘That’s a huge effect,’ says Ian Lipkin, one of the study’s authors . [sent-9, score-0.211]
7 ‘when you start talking about autism, a disorder that has an incidence of 1 percent or higher, that really does bring it to home,’ Lipkin says. [sent-12, score-0.519]
8 ’” How do you get from 1 or 2 per 1000 to “1 percent or higher”? [sent-14, score-0.237]
9 So it seems like we’re seeing the most statistically significant of at least 6 comparisons. [sent-16, score-0.267]
10 In general I recommend addressing multiple comparisons problems by using hierarchical models, but it’s not clear to me exactly what I would do in this case. [sent-17, score-0.357]
11 It would be good to have a general method to recommend for this sort of problem. [sent-18, score-0.096]
12 I think it would involve regularization and informative priors. [sent-19, score-0.074]
13 Finally, there’s causality—do the folate and non-folate parents differ, on average, in important ways not controlled for in the analysis? [sent-20, score-0.317]
14 I will say, though, that we followed the folate recommendation ourselves. [sent-22, score-0.243]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1893 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-11-Folic acid and autism
Introduction: Aurelian Muntean writes: I have read an article on NPR and the journal article that spun this news. What draw my attention was the discussion in terms of causation implied by one of the authors of the article interviewed in the NPR news, and also by the conclusions of the article itself claiming large effects. Although the total sample (self-selecting pregnant women) seems very large (85,176) the subsamples (270 out of which 114 were in the sub-subsample revealing statistically significant association) used to support the analysis seem to be too small. Or not? My response: The different sources of information do seem to be in some conflict: - The JAMA article reports the autism rate of 1 per 1000 for children of mothers taking folic acid and 2 per 1000 for children of mothers not taking folic acid. (They also report the adjusted odds ratio as 0.6 rather than 0.5, indicted that the two groups differ a bit in some background variables.) - The NPR article has this q
Introduction: Hey, we all know the answer: “correlation does not imply causation”—but of course life is more complicated than that. As philosophers, economists, statisticians, and others have repeatedly noted, most of our information about the world is observational not experimental, yet we manage to draw causal conclusions all the time. Sure, some of these conclusions are wrong (more often than 5% of the time, I’m sure) but that’s an accepted part of life. Challenges in this regard arise in the design of a study, in the statistical analysis, in how you write it up for a peer-reviewed journal, and finally in how you present it to the world. School sports and life outcomes An interesting case of all this came up recently in a post on Freakonomics that pointed to a post on Deadspin that pointed to a research article . The claim was that “sports participation [in high school] causes women to be less likely to be religious . . . more likely to have children . . . more likely to be singl
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Introduction: Joe Northrup writes: I have a question about correcting for multiple comparisons in a Bayesian regression model. I believe I understand the argument in your 2012 paper in Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness that when you have a hierarchical model there is shrinkage of estimates towards the group-level mean and thus there is no need to add any additional penalty to correct for multiple comparisons. In my case I do not have hierarchically structured data—i.e. I have only 1 observation per group but have a categorical variable with a large number of categories. Thus, I am fitting a simple multiple regression in a Bayesian framework. Would putting a strong, mean 0, multivariate normal prior on the betas in this model accomplish the same sort of shrinkage (it seems to me that it would) and do you believe this is a valid way to address criticism of multiple comparisons in this setting? My reply: Yes, I think this makes sense. One way to address concerns of multiple com
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Introduction: The title of this post by Sanjay Srivastava illustrates an annoying misconception that’s crept into the (otherwise delightful) recent publicity related to my article with Hal Stern, he difference between “significant” and “not significant” is not itself statistically significant. When people bring this up, they keep referring to the difference between p=0.05 and p=0.06, making the familiar (and correct) point about the arbitrariness of the conventional p-value threshold of 0.05. And, sure, I agree with this, but everybody knows that already. The point Hal and I were making was that even apparently large differences in p-values are not statistically significant. For example, if you have one study with z=2.5 (almost significant at the 1% level!) and another with z=1 (not statistically significant at all, only 1 se from zero!), then their difference has a z of about 1 (again, not statistically significant at all). So it’s not just a comparison of 0.05 vs. 0.06, even a differenc
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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
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Introduction: Aurelian Muntean writes: I have read an article on NPR and the journal article that spun this news. What draw my attention was the discussion in terms of causation implied by one of the authors of the article interviewed in the NPR news, and also by the conclusions of the article itself claiming large effects. Although the total sample (self-selecting pregnant women) seems very large (85,176) the subsamples (270 out of which 114 were in the sub-subsample revealing statistically significant association) used to support the analysis seem to be too small. Or not? My response: The different sources of information do seem to be in some conflict: - The JAMA article reports the autism rate of 1 per 1000 for children of mothers taking folic acid and 2 per 1000 for children of mothers not taking folic acid. (They also report the adjusted odds ratio as 0.6 rather than 0.5, indicted that the two groups differ a bit in some background variables.) - The NPR article has this q
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: Jeff sent me an email with the above title and a link to a press release, “Nut consumption reduces risk of death,” which begins: According to the largest study of its kind, people who ate a daily handful of nuts were 20 percent less likely to die from any cause over a 30-year period than those who didn’t consume nuts . . . Their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, contains further good news: The regular nut-eaters were found to be more slender than those who didn’t eat nuts, a finding that should alleviate fears that eating a lot of nuts will lead to overweight. . . . For the new research, the scientists were able to tap databases from two well-known, ongoing observational studies that collect data on diet and other lifestyle factors and various health outcomes. The Nurses’ Health Study provided data on 76,464 women between 1980 and 2010, and the Health Professionals’ Follow-Up Study yielded data on 42,498 men from 1986 to 2010. . . . Sophisticated data a
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Introduction: Two different people pointed me to this article by Vlastimil Hart et al. in the journal Frontiers in Zoology: It is for the first time that (a) magnetic sensitivity was proved in dogs, (b) a measurable, predictable behavioral reaction upon natural MF fluctuations could be unambiguously proven in a mammal, and (c) high sensitivity to small changes in polarity, rather than in intensity, of MF was identified as biologically meaningful. Our findings open new horizons in magnetoreception research. Since the MF is calm in only about 20 % of the daylight period, our findings might provide an explanation why many magnetoreception experiments were hardly replicable and why directional values of records in diverse observations are frequently compromised by scatter. Tom Passin writes: Here we seem to have multiple comparisons and (to me, at least) dubious plausibility, together with a kind of fanciful topic and a large vaiety of plausible alternative explanations. And another co
Introduction: Etienne LeBel writes: You’ve probably already seen it, but I thought you could have a lot of fun with this one!! The article , with the admirably clear title given above, is by James McNulty, Michael Olson, Andrea Meltzer, Matthew Shaffer, and begins as follows: For decades, social psychological theories have posited that the automatic processes captured by implicit measures have implications for social outcomes. Yet few studies have demonstrated any long-term implications of automatic processes, and some scholars have begun to question the relevance and even the validity of these theories. At baseline of our longitudinal study, 135 newlywed couples (270 individuals) completed an explicit measure of their conscious attitudes toward their relationship and an implicit measure of their automatic attitudes toward their partner. They then reported their marital satisfaction every 6 months for the next 4 years. We found no correlation between spouses’ automatic and conscious attitu
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Introduction: Grazia Pittau, Roberto Zelli, and I came out with a paper investigating the role of economic variables in predicting regional disparities in reported life satisfaction of European Union citizens. We use multilevel modeling to explicitly account for the hierarchical nature of our data, respondents within regions and countries, and for understanding patterns of variation within and between regions. Here’s what we found: - Personal income matters more in poor regions than in rich regions, a pattern that still holds for regions within the same country. - Being unemployed is negatively associated with life satisfaction even after controlled for income variation. Living in high unemployment regions does not alleviate the unhappiness of being out of work. - After controlling for individual characteristics and modeling interactions, regional differences in life satisfaction still remain. Here’s a quick graph; there’s more in the article:
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Introduction: Your taxes pay for the research funding that supports the work we do here, some of which appears on this blog and almost all of which is public, free, and open-source. So, to all of the taxpayers out there in the audience: thank you.
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Introduction: Aaron Swartz writes the following, as a lead-in to an argument in favor of vegetarianism: Imagine you were an early settler of what is now the United States. It seems likely you would have killed native Americans. After all, your parents killed them, your siblings killed them, your friends killed them, the leaders of the community killed them, the President killed them. Chances are, you would have killed them too . . . Or if you see nothing wrong with killing native Americans, take the example of slavery. Again, everyone had slaves and probably didn’t think too much about the morality of it. . . . Are these statements true, though? It’s hard for me to believe that most early settlers (from the context, it looks like Swartz is discussing the 1500s-1700s here) killed native Americans. That is, if N is the number of early settlers, and Y is the number of these settlers who killed at least one Indian, I suspect Y/N is much closer to 0 than to 1. Similarly, it’s not even cl
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Introduction: In an article headlined, “Hollywood moves away from middlebrow,” Brooks Barnes writes : As Hollywood plowed into 2010, there was plenty of clinging to the tried and true: humdrum remakes like “The Wolfman” and “The A-Team”; star vehicles like “Killers” with Ashton Kutcher and “The Tourist” with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp; and shoddy sequels like “Sex and the City 2.” All arrived at theaters with marketing thunder intended to fill multiplexes on opening weekend, no matter the quality of the film. . . . But the audience pushed back. One by one, these expensive yet middle-of-the-road pictures delivered disappointing results or flat-out flopped. Meanwhile, gambles on original concepts paid off. “Inception,” a complicated thriller about dream invaders, racked up more than $825 million in global ticket sales; “The Social Network” has so far delivered $192 million, a stellar result for a highbrow drama. . . . the message that the year sent about quality and originality is real enoug
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