andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2284 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

2284 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-07-How literature is like statistical reasoning: Kosara on stories. Gelman and Basbøll on stories.


meta infos for this blog

Source: html

Introduction: In “Story: A Definition,” visual analysis researcher Robert Kosara writes : A story ties facts together. There is a reason why this particular collection of facts is in this story, and the story gives you that reason. provides a narrative path through those facts. In other words, it guides the viewer/reader through the world, rather than just throwing them in there. presents a particular interpretation of those facts. A story is always a particular path through a world, so it favors one way of seeing things over all others. The relevance of these ideas to statistical graphics is apparent. From a completely different direction, in “When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences,” Thomas Basbøll and I write : Storytelling has long been recognized as central to human cognition and communication. Here we explore a more active role of stories in social science research, not merely to illustrate concepts but also to develop new ideas and evalu


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 In “Story: A Definition,” visual analysis researcher Robert Kosara writes : A story ties facts together. [sent-1, score-0.578]

2 There is a reason why this particular collection of facts is in this story, and the story gives you that reason. [sent-2, score-0.58]

3 In other words, it guides the viewer/reader through the world, rather than just throwing them in there. [sent-4, score-0.198]

4 presents a particular interpretation of those facts. [sent-5, score-0.194]

5 A story is always a particular path through a world, so it favors one way of seeing things over all others. [sent-6, score-0.618]

6 The relevance of these ideas to statistical graphics is apparent. [sent-7, score-0.496]

7 From a completely different direction, in “When do stories work? [sent-8, score-0.314]

8 Evidence and illustration in the social sciences,” Thomas Basbøll and I write : Storytelling has long been recognized as central to human cognition and communication. [sent-9, score-0.5]

9 Here we explore a more active role of stories in social science research, not merely to illustrate concepts but also to develop new ideas and evaluate hypotheses, for example in deciding that a research method is effective. [sent-10, score-1.035]

10 We draw a connection to posterior predictive checking, which I earlier had argued is fundamentally connected with statistical graphics and exploratory data analysis (see this paper from 2003 and this one 2004). [sent-12, score-0.612]

11 I just wanted to juxtapose these two perspectives, each of which connect statistical graphics to literature, but in a different way. [sent-14, score-0.505]

12 Kosara focuses on the idea that stories have narrative and viewpoint, and Basbøll and I focus on the idea that effective stories are anomalous and immutable. [sent-15, score-1.187]

13 All these ideas seem important to me, and it would be interesting to think about how they fit together. [sent-16, score-0.139]


similar blogs computed by tfidf model

tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

[('stories', 0.314), ('anomalous', 0.255), ('story', 0.234), ('kosara', 0.223), ('narrative', 0.215), ('graphics', 0.195), ('basb', 0.172), ('path', 0.166), ('facts', 0.157), ('juxtapose', 0.142), ('viewpoint', 0.142), ('ideas', 0.139), ('central', 0.127), ('guides', 0.114), ('particular', 0.111), ('ties', 0.109), ('favors', 0.107), ('storytelling', 0.106), ('engagement', 0.106), ('illustration', 0.104), ('cognition', 0.103), ('deciding', 0.098), ('perspectives', 0.092), ('representing', 0.092), ('established', 0.09), ('fundamentally', 0.089), ('focuses', 0.089), ('concepts', 0.088), ('connect', 0.086), ('connected', 0.085), ('world', 0.085), ('recognized', 0.085), ('throwing', 0.084), ('presents', 0.083), ('statistical', 0.082), ('active', 0.082), ('hypotheses', 0.081), ('exploratory', 0.081), ('social', 0.081), ('illustrate', 0.08), ('argued', 0.08), ('definition', 0.08), ('relevance', 0.08), ('indicate', 0.079), ('collection', 0.078), ('evaluation', 0.078), ('visual', 0.078), ('explore', 0.077), ('theories', 0.076), ('evaluate', 0.076)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 1.0 2284 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-07-How literature is like statistical reasoning: Kosara on stories. Gelman and Basbøll on stories.

Introduction: In “Story: A Definition,” visual analysis researcher Robert Kosara writes : A story ties facts together. There is a reason why this particular collection of facts is in this story, and the story gives you that reason. provides a narrative path through those facts. In other words, it guides the viewer/reader through the world, rather than just throwing them in there. presents a particular interpretation of those facts. A story is always a particular path through a world, so it favors one way of seeing things over all others. The relevance of these ideas to statistical graphics is apparent. From a completely different direction, in “When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences,” Thomas Basbøll and I write : Storytelling has long been recognized as central to human cognition and communication. Here we explore a more active role of stories in social science research, not merely to illustrate concepts but also to develop new ideas and evalu

2 0.16715445 855 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-16-Infovis and statgraphics update update

Introduction: To continue our discussion from last week , consider three positions regarding the display of information: (a) The traditional tabular approach. This is how most statisticians, econometricians, political scientists, sociologists, etc., seem to operate. They understand the appeal of a pretty graph, and they’re willing to plot some data as part of an exploratory data analysis, but they see their serious research as leading to numerical estimates, p-values, tables of numbers. These people might use a graph to illustrate their points but they don’t see them as necessary in their research. (b) Statistical graphics as performed by Howard Wainer, Bill Cleveland, Dianne Cook, etc. They–we–see graphics as central to the process of statistical modeling and data analysis and are interested in graphs (static and dynamic) that display every data point as transparently as possible. (c) Information visualization or infographics, as performed by graphics designers and statisticians who are

3 0.15969527 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”

Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been

4 0.15907171 847 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-10-Using a “pure infographic” to explore differences between information visualization and statistical graphics

Introduction: Our discussion on data visualization continues. One one side are three statisticians–Antony Unwin, Kaiser Fung, and myself. We have been writing about the different goals served by information visualization and statistical graphics. On the other side are graphics experts (sorry for the imprecision, I don’t know exactly what these people do in their day jobs or how they are trained, and I don’t want to mislabel them) such as Robert Kosara and Jen Lowe , who seem a bit annoyed at how my colleagues and myself seem to follow the Tufte strategy of criticizing what we don’t understand. And on the third side are many (most?) academic statisticians, econometricians, etc., who don’t understand or respect graphs and seem to think of visualization as a toy that is unrelated to serious science or statistics. I’m not so interested in the third group right now–I tried to communicate with them in my big articles from 2003 and 2004 )–but I am concerned that our dialogue with the graphic

5 0.14690603 408 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-11-Incumbency advantage in 2010

Introduction: See here for the full story.

6 0.142685 1927 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-05-“Numbersense: How to use big data to your advantage”

7 0.13974503 816 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-22-“Information visualization” vs. “Statistical graphics”

8 0.13938034 1318 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-13-Stolen jokes

9 0.13870534 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)

10 0.12964585 1750 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-05-Watership Down, thick description, applied statistics, immutability of stories, and playing tennis with a net

11 0.12561429 1779 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-27-“Two Dogmas of Strong Objective Bayesianism”

12 0.12216835 1848 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-09-A tale of two discussion papers

13 0.11666564 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals

14 0.11499679 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist

15 0.11498825 2184 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-24-Parables vs. stories

16 0.11402218 1584 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-19-Tradeoffs in information graphics

17 0.11382589 1408 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-07-Not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others

18 0.11108525 2274 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-30-Adjudicating between alternative interpretations of a statistical interaction?

19 0.10969777 1742 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-27-What is “explanation”?

20 0.10616077 878 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-Infovis, infographics, and data visualization: Where I’m coming from, and where I’d like to go


similar blogs computed by lsi model

lsi for this blog:

topicId topicWeight

[(0, 0.19), (1, -0.009), (2, -0.086), (3, 0.013), (4, -0.005), (5, -0.059), (6, -0.099), (7, 0.023), (8, 0.034), (9, 0.031), (10, -0.047), (11, 0.011), (12, -0.044), (13, 0.012), (14, -0.045), (15, -0.052), (16, -0.017), (17, -0.038), (18, 0.041), (19, 0.013), (20, -0.047), (21, -0.099), (22, -0.022), (23, -0.015), (24, 0.007), (25, 0.059), (26, 0.021), (27, 0.04), (28, -0.009), (29, 0.006), (30, 0.01), (31, 0.047), (32, 0.002), (33, 0.049), (34, 0.1), (35, 0.039), (36, -0.048), (37, -0.024), (38, 0.074), (39, -0.017), (40, -0.017), (41, 0.011), (42, 0.022), (43, -0.05), (44, 0.023), (45, -0.033), (46, -0.021), (47, 0.012), (48, -0.077), (49, 0.001)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 0.97395158 2284 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-07-How literature is like statistical reasoning: Kosara on stories. Gelman and Basbøll on stories.

Introduction: In “Story: A Definition,” visual analysis researcher Robert Kosara writes : A story ties facts together. There is a reason why this particular collection of facts is in this story, and the story gives you that reason. provides a narrative path through those facts. In other words, it guides the viewer/reader through the world, rather than just throwing them in there. presents a particular interpretation of those facts. A story is always a particular path through a world, so it favors one way of seeing things over all others. The relevance of these ideas to statistical graphics is apparent. From a completely different direction, in “When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences,” Thomas Basbøll and I write : Storytelling has long been recognized as central to human cognition and communication. Here we explore a more active role of stories in social science research, not merely to illustrate concepts but also to develop new ideas and evalu

2 0.81857103 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”

Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been

3 0.75165433 1742 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-27-What is “explanation”?

Introduction: “Explanation” is this thing that social scientists (or people in their everyday lives, acting like social scientists) do, where some event X happens and we supply a coherent story that concludes with X. Sometimes we speak of an event as “overdetermined,” when we can think of many plausible stories that all lead to X. My question today is: what is explanation, in a statistical sense? To understand why this is a question worth asking at all, compare to prediction. Prediction is another thing that we all to, typically in a qualitative fashion: I think she’s gonna win this struggle, I think he’s probably gonna look for a new job, etc. It’s pretty clear how to map everyday prediction into a statistical framework, and we can think of informal qualitative predictions as approximations to the predictions that could be made by a statistical model (as in the classic work of Meehl and others on clinical vs. statistical prediction). Fitting “explanation” into a statistical framework i

4 0.70334947 789 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-07-Descriptive statistics, causal inference, and story time

Introduction: Dave Backus points me to this review by anthropologist Mike McGovern of two books by economist Paul Collier on the politics of economic development in Africa. My first reaction was that this was interesting but non-statistical so I’d have to either post it on the sister blog or wait until the 30 days of statistics was over. But then I looked more carefully and realized that this discussion is very relevant to applied statistics. Here’s McGovern’s substantive critique: Much of the fundamental intellectual work in Collier’s analyses is, in fact, ethnographic. Because it is not done very self-consciously and takes place within a larger econometric rhetoric in which such forms of knowledge are dismissed as “subjective” or worse still biased by the political (read “leftist”) agendas of the academics who create them, it is often ethnography of a low quality. . . . Despite the adoption of a Naipaulian unsentimental-dispatches-from-the-trenches rhetoric, the story told in Collier’s

5 0.70108002 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime

Introduction: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work. In statisti

6 0.69235665 1096 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-02-Graphical communication for legal scholarship

7 0.68860078 847 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-10-Using a “pure infographic” to explore differences between information visualization and statistical graphics

8 0.68686837 1750 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-05-Watership Down, thick description, applied statistics, immutability of stories, and playing tennis with a net

9 0.68505955 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist

10 0.67087203 1848 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-09-A tale of two discussion papers

11 0.65480626 855 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-16-Infovis and statgraphics update update

12 0.65240389 2001 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-29-Edgar Allan Poe was a statistician

13 0.64990759 816 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-22-“Information visualization” vs. “Statistical graphics”

14 0.64384145 1812 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously

15 0.64102596 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)

16 0.6357072 38 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-18-Breastfeeding, infant hyperbilirubinemia, statistical graphics, and modern medicine

17 0.62629354 2057 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-10-Chris Chabris is irritated by Malcolm Gladwell

18 0.62238419 471 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-17-Attractive models (and data) wanted for statistical art show.

19 0.62147737 757 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-10-Controversy over the Christakis-Fowler findings on the contagion of obesity

20 0.61768323 2251 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-17-In the best alternative histories, the real world is what’s ultimately real


similar blogs computed by lda model

lda for this blog:

topicId topicWeight

[(15, 0.018), (16, 0.056), (21, 0.055), (24, 0.163), (25, 0.011), (28, 0.015), (36, 0.022), (42, 0.015), (48, 0.018), (57, 0.023), (63, 0.07), (76, 0.059), (99, 0.384)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 0.98642319 2284 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-07-How literature is like statistical reasoning: Kosara on stories. Gelman and Basbøll on stories.

Introduction: In “Story: A Definition,” visual analysis researcher Robert Kosara writes : A story ties facts together. There is a reason why this particular collection of facts is in this story, and the story gives you that reason. provides a narrative path through those facts. In other words, it guides the viewer/reader through the world, rather than just throwing them in there. presents a particular interpretation of those facts. A story is always a particular path through a world, so it favors one way of seeing things over all others. The relevance of these ideas to statistical graphics is apparent. From a completely different direction, in “When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences,” Thomas Basbøll and I write : Storytelling has long been recognized as central to human cognition and communication. Here we explore a more active role of stories in social science research, not merely to illustrate concepts but also to develop new ideas and evalu

2 0.98002207 1690 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-23-When are complicated models helpful in psychology research and when are they overkill?

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

3 0.97866881 1506 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-21-Building a regression model . . . with only 27 data points

Introduction: Dan Silitonga writes: I was wondering whether you would have any advice on building a regression model on a very small datasets. I’m in the midst of revamping the model to predict tax collections from unincorporated businesses. But I only have 27 data points, 27 years of annual data. Any advice would be much appreciated. My reply: This sounds tough, especially given that 27 years of annual data isn’t even 27 independent data points. I have various essentially orthogonal suggestions: 1 [added after seeing John Cook's comment below]. Do your best, making as many assumptions as you need. In a Bayesian context, this means that you’d use a strong and informative prior and let the data update it as appropriate. In a less formal setting, you’d start with a guess of a model and then alter it to the extent that your data contradict your original guess. 2. Get more data. Not by getting information on more years (I assume you can’t do that) but by breaking up the data you do

4 0.9780606 421 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-19-Just chaid

Introduction: Reading somebody else’s statistics rant made me realize the inherent contradictions in much of my own statistical advice. Jeff Lax sent along this article by Philip Schrodt, along with the cryptic comment: Perhaps of interest to you. perhaps not. Not meant to be an excuse for you to rant against hypothesis testing again. In his article, Schrodt makes a reasonable and entertaining argument against the overfitting of data and the overuse of linear models. He states that his article is motivated by the quantitative papers he has been sent to review for journals or conferences, and he explicitly excludes “studies of United States voting behavior,” so at least I think Mister P is off the hook. I notice a bit of incoherence in Schrodt’s position–on one hand, he criticizes “kitchen-sink models” for overfitting and he criticizes “using complex methods without understanding the underlying assumptions” . . . but then later on he suggests that political scientists in this countr

5 0.97756356 291 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-22-Philosophy of Bayes and non-Bayes: A dialogue with Deborah Mayo

Introduction: I sent Deborah Mayo a link to my paper with Cosma Shalizi on the philosophy of statistics, and she sent me the link to this conference which unfortunately already occurred. (It’s too bad, because I’d have liked to have been there.) I summarized my philosophy as follows: I am highly sympathetic to the approach of Lakatos (or of Popper, if you consider Lakatos’s “Popper_2″ to be a reasonable simulation of the true Popperism), in that (a) I view statistical models as being built within theoretical structures, and (b) I see the checking and refutation of models to be a key part of scientific progress. A big problem I have with mainstream Bayesianism is its “inductivist” view that science can operate completely smoothly with posterior updates: the idea that new data causes us to increase the posterior probability of good models and decrease the posterior probability of bad models. I don’t buy that: I see models as ever-changing entities that are flexible and can be patched and ex

6 0.97671026 855 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-16-Infovis and statgraphics update update

7 0.97404349 394 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-2010: What happened?

8 0.97329861 2251 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-17-In the best alternative histories, the real world is what’s ultimately real

9 0.97319633 2120 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-02-Does a professor’s intervention in online discussions have the effect of prolonging discussion or cutting it off?

10 0.97224963 2103 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-16-Objects of the class “Objects of the class”

11 0.97217703 1105 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-08-Econ debate about prices at a fancy restaurant

12 0.97198147 2142 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-21-Chasing the noise

13 0.97166657 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)

14 0.97111452 2263 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-24-Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models

15 0.9710443 2170 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-13-Judea Pearl overview on causal inference, and more general thoughts on the reexpression of existing methods by considering their implicit assumptions

16 0.97091675 518 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-15-Regression discontinuity designs: looking for the keys under the lamppost?

17 0.9708721 888 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-03-A psychology researcher asks: Is Anova dead?

18 0.97081822 257 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-04-Question about standard range for social science correlations

19 0.97078282 505 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-05-Wacky interview questions: An exploration into the nature of evidence on the internet

20 0.97072524 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83