andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2043 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578484941173658754.html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. The first being, of course, that with only 14% of service members being female, it is quite likely by their broad definition that the 86% of service members who are men actually *do* comprise the majority of unwanted sexual attention even if the incidence is only a fraction of that of female service members. Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would
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1 Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. [sent-1, score-0.243]
2 com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online. [sent-4, score-0.27]
3 html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. [sent-7, score-0.252]
4 The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. [sent-8, score-1.42]
5 Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would have well over 50% of sexual advances experienced by women. [sent-10, score-1.014]
6 Which is not to say that there might not be problems of men reporting male-on-male improprieties—given that the first response tends to be either “it was consensual” or “they wanted it”, I wonder how many heterosexual men in the armed forces are likely to bring a complaint in such circumstances? [sent-11, score-1.422]
7 Especially since “unwanted sexual advance” is a rather broad definition. [sent-12, score-0.549]
8 I haven’t looked into this enough to have any informed reaction, just wanted to share with you as this indicates the difficulties of measurement and the challenges of interpreting measurements. [sent-13, score-0.63]
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Introduction: Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578484941173658754.html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. The first being, of course, that with only 14% of service members being female, it is quite likely by their broad definition that the 86% of service members who are men actually *do* comprise the majority of unwanted sexual attention even if the incidence is only a fraction of that of female service members. Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would
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Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
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Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
Introduction: Dean Eckles writes: Thought you might be interested in an example that touches on a couple recurring topics: 1. The difference between a statistically significant finding and one that is non-significant need not be itself statistically significant (thus highlighting the problems of using NHST to declare whether an effect exists or not). 2. Continued issues with the credibility of high profile studies of “social contagion”, especially by Christakis and Fowler . A new paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior produces observational estimates of peer effects in sexual behavior and same-sex attraction. In the text, the authors (who include C&F;) make repeated comparisons of the results for peer effects in sexual intercourse and those for peer effects in same-sex attraction. However, the 95% CI for the later actually includes the point estimate for the former! This is most clear in Figure 2, as highlighted by Real Clear Science’s blog post about the study. (Now because there is som
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Introduction: 13. A survey of American adults is conducted that includes too many women and not enough men in the sample. In the resulting weighting, each female respondent is given a weight of 1 and each male respondent is given a weight of 1.5. The sample includes 600 women and 380 men, of whom 400 women and 100 men respond Yes to a particular question of interest. Give an estimate and standard error for the proportion of American adults who would answer Yes to this question if asked. Solution to question 12 From yesterday : 12. A researcher fits a regression model predicting some political behavior given predictors for demographics and several measures of economic ideology. The coefficients for the ideology measures are not statistically significant, and the researcher creates a new measure, adding up the ideology questions and creating a common score, and then fits a new regression including the new score and removing the individual ideology questions from the model. Which of the follo
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Introduction: Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578484941173658754.html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. The first being, of course, that with only 14% of service members being female, it is quite likely by their broad definition that the 86% of service members who are men actually *do* comprise the majority of unwanted sexual attention even if the incidence is only a fraction of that of female service members. Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would
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Introduction: Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article , “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. . . . We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES [effect size], the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). Echidne quotes a news article in which one of the study’s authors going overboard: “Psychologically, men a
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Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
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Introduction: The (U.S.) “President’s Cancer Panel” has released its 2008-2009 annual report, which includes a cover letter that says “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.” The report itself discusses exposures to various types of industrial chemicals, some of which are known carcinogens, in some detail, but gives nearly no data or analysis to suggest that these exposures are contributing to significant numbers of cancers. In fact, there is pretty good evidence that they are not. The plot above shows age-adjusted cancer mortality for men, by cancer type, in the U.S. The plot below shows the same for women. In both cases, the cancers with the highest mortality rates are shown, but not all cancers (e.g. brain cancer is not shown). For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how trustworthy the rates are from the 1930s — it seems possible that reporting, autopsies, or both, were less careful during the Great Depression — so I suggest focusing on the r
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Introduction: “Even as you get near the upper reaches of the normal weight range, you begin to see increases in chronic diseases,” said JoAnn Manson, chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, HMS Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women’s Health, and HSPH professor of epidemiology. “It’s a clear gradient of increase.” Yeah, she would say that. Thin people. And then there’s Frank Hu, professor of nutrition at Harvard: The studies that Flegal [the author of the original study finding a negative correlation between body mass index and mortality] did use included many samples of people who were chronically ill, current smokers and elderly, according to Hu. These factors are associated with weight loss and increased mortality. In other words, people are not dying because they are slim, he said. They are slim because they are dying—of cancer or old age, for example. By doing a meta-analysis of studies that did not properly control for this bias, Flegal amplif
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same-blog 1 0.98139071 2043 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-29-The difficulties of measuring just about anything
Introduction: Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578484941173658754.html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. The first being, of course, that with only 14% of service members being female, it is quite likely by their broad definition that the 86% of service members who are men actually *do* comprise the majority of unwanted sexual attention even if the incidence is only a fraction of that of female service members. Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would
2 0.94119513 2088 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-04-Recently in the sister blog
Introduction: This one’s probably the most important: Republicans on track to retain control of House in 2014 And I like this one for the headline: Impact factor 911 is a joke Here are the others: Press releases make for fishy statistics Why is the Motley Fool hyping Netflix? Our health-care system is like Coca Cola Obama takes big bucks from telecoms, ramps up national security state I have mixed feelings about the move of the Monkey Cage blog to the Washington Post. I’ve been told we get many more readers, but the the comments have declined in number and in quality. It used to be that posting at the Monkey Cage felt like “blogging”: I’d post something there and look at the comments. It was a political science community with many participants from outside the field. Posting at the new blog is more like writing for the newspaper: it’s a broadcast without real feedback. This all makes me realize how much I appreciate the commenters here. Just as I blog for free, out
Introduction: Nick Brown is bothered by this article , “An unscented Kalman filter approach to the estimation of nonlinear dynamical systems models,” by Sy-Miin Chow, Emilio Ferrer, and John Nesselroade. The introduction of the article cites a bunch of articles in serious psych/statistics journals. The question is, are such advanced statistical techniques really needed, or even legitimate, with the kind of very rough data that is usually available in psych applications? Or is it just fishing in the hope of discovering patterns that are not really there? I wrote: It seems like a pretty innocuous literature review. I agree that many of the applications are silly (for example, they cite the work of the notorious John Gottman in fitting a predator-prey model to spousal relations (!)), but overall they just seem to be presenting very standard ideas for the mathematical-psychology audience. It’s not clear whether advanced techniques are always appropriate here, but they come in through a natura
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to this article by Matt Ridley that manages to push all my buttons. Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” that could be redeemed from different (certified) places–gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. Three things here. First, I’m sick and tired of all the rich-white bashing. I mean, what’s the deal? Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. Second, the rich-white thing seems so selective. Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? Rich whites who w
5 0.93053722 2110 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-22-A Bayesian model for an increasing function, in Stan!
Introduction: Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s David Chudzicki’s story (with graphs and Stan/R code!) of how he fit a model for an increasing function (“isotonic regression”). Chudzicki writes: This post will describe a way I came up with of fitting a function that’s constrained to be increasing, using Stan. If you want practical help, standard statistical approaches, or expert research, this isn’t the place for you (look up “isotonic regression” or “Bayesian isotonic regression” or David Dunson). This is the place for you if you want to read about how I thought about setting up a model, implemented the model in Stan, and created graphics to understand what was going on. The background is that a simple, natural-seeming uniform prior on the function values does not work so well—it’s a much stronger prior distribution than one might naively think, just one of those unexpected aspects of high-dimensional probability distributions. So Chudzicki sets up a more general family with a hype
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