Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Combinatorist Gil Kalai points to these papers where he and his colleagues cast doubt on claims of “quantum supremacy” by some Google researchers: Y. Rinott, T. Shoham, and G. Kalai, Statistical Aspects of the Quantum Supremacy Demonstration, Statistical Science (2022) G. … Continue reading →
This is Jessica. Last week the 2024 Turing award winners were announced. It went to pioneers in reinforcement learning Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton. Academic computer scientists get excited about Turing awards. On the positive side, people like to see … Continue reading →
After sharing this amusing/horrifying social media post, Paul Campos offers this “preliminary typology” of stupidity: Natural stupidity. This just means low cognitive ability in the most straightforward least mysterious way. What people usually mean by stupidity in other words. Social … Continue reading →
I was on the Freaknomics page and . . . they’re not all bad—they have lots of good stuff too! Here’s a transcript of a podcast about Little League: Youth baseball — long a widely accessible American pastime — has … Continue reading →
This is Eric. It’s hard to follow Jesus, but here we are. Vianey Leos Barajas and I are organizing StanBio Connect 2025 conference: https://stanbio.org StanBio is a free, one-day online conference that will take place on Friday, 30 May 2025 … Continue reading →
The above graph shows for the world record times in the mile run from 1913 through 1999, along with a fitted regression line (in blue), and 10 draws from the posterior distribution of the line (in red). Here’s the fitted … Continue reading →
This post is by Lizzie. This year’s International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition has closed and we can now wait to see how contestants’ and the bot’s predictions fare. Results are up on the website, with average predictions around late this … Continue reading →
Palko writes: It has largely been shoved down the memory hole, but in 2014 and 2015, virtually every major news organization was credulously reporting on a laughably obvious scam project that claimed it was on the verge of setting up … Continue reading →
This recent post from Gaurav Sood reminds me of this post of mine from 2007: One of my favorite instances of numeracy in literature is William Saroyan’s story, “70,000 Assyrians,” which I read in the collection, Bedside Tales. The story … Continue reading →
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under … Continue reading →
We sometimes have discussions on the blog warning people against displaying too many significant digits. For example, back in 2012 I asked, “Is it meaningful to talk about a probability of “65.7%” that Obama will win the election?”, and I … Continue reading →
I came across this book, Music After Modernism, a collection of essays from 1979 by pianist and critic Samuel Lipman. The book revolves around the fact that the classical music repertoire pretty much ends around 1930, indeed with not much … Continue reading →
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might … Continue reading →
I recently learned that the radio show Desert Island Discs is available in podcast form. It’s good! I recently listened to the interview with Laurie Anderson. The gimmick is that you list the 8 records you would take if you … Continue reading →
A couple years ago we reported on some iffy statistics used by the Maryland Department of Transportation in their goal to add lanes to the Beltway: Don’t go back to Rockville: Possible scientific fraud in the traffic model for a … Continue reading →
“On or about December 1910 human character changed.” — Virginia Woolf (1924). Woolf’s quote about modernism in the arts rings true, in part because we continue to see relatively sudden changes in intellectual life, not merely from technology (email and … Continue reading →
My favorite podcast is BBC Bookclub. I’ve been working my way through the archives, listening when I’m on my bike, and unfortunately I’m almost done. Today I was listening to Colm Toibin answer questions about his book, The Master. As … Continue reading →
An economist who would prefer anonymity points to the above wacky graph of a “robust regression.” It’s from a paper written by 2 out of the 3 recent Nobel prize winners in economics! The full paper is here, and my … Continue reading →
John Cook writes: Let a, b, and c be the sides of a triangle. Let p be perimeter of the triangle. Let r be the radius of the largest circle that can be inscribed in the triangle, and let R … Continue reading →
The current system of scholarly journal review is absolutely nuts. The vast majority of review effort goes to papers that nobody reads. We can do better via scheduled post-publication review, for example every time a paper reaches its 250th citation, … Continue reading →
This award was established to recognize members of the media for their presentation of the science of statistics and its role in public life. The award can be given for a single statistical presentation or for sustained worthy contributions to … Continue reading →
This is Jessica. Last week I wrote about how statistical methods can sometimes evoke “moral dismay” when you consider how they build in expectations of a simpler, less dynamic world than we would probably want to live in. But another … Continue reading →
I dogfood it. The statistical methods in our books are the methods we use in teaching, consulting, and research; I use Stan to solve applied problems; etc. But not everybody does. Sometimes maybe it doesn’t matter. If that notorious Stanford … Continue reading →
This post is by Lizzie As February draws to an end, so does your chance to enter the Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition! We challenge you to predict the bloom date of cherry trees at five locations throughout the world for … Continue reading →
Benjamin Stevenson is the author of the recent instant-classic Christie-style mystery novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone–its sequel, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, is also excellent. In an interview with Lenny Picker, Stevenson says: I started … Continue reading →
On 1 Feb 2025, Dale Lehman wrote: If you are inclined, I think this is worth blogging about sooner rather than later: A list of government web pages that went dark Friday | AP News And, if you do, please … Continue reading →
Gwynn Gebeyehu points us to this announcement: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Government Advances in Statistical Programming (GASP) 2025 Submissions Due: 5 April 2025 We invite you to submit an abstract for the next Government Advances in Statistical Programming (GASP) conference scheduled … Continue reading →
Ilan Strauss and Tim O’Reilly ask: Why don’t ML and LLM model evaluations report uncertainty? Rarely see an interval of some kind. – Because the models are too big (LLMs)? – Or because their ML metrics (Accuracy, recall, precision) are … Continue reading →
Lauren Coffey reports: A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania have created AI tools to help admissions officers by analyzing students’ application essays. The tools help admissions officers identify seven key … Continue reading →
Katherine Rundell quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing “his central Principle of Criticism”: never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former … Continue reading →
This is Jessica. As part of teaching prep this week, I was re-reading this paper by Gneiting et al on the usefulness of maximizing sharpness subject to calibration (over prioritizing calibration alone). It got me thinking about how certain statistical … Continue reading →
Prolific science writer Philip Ball wrote a book called The Modern Myths, where he pointed to: – Robinson Crusoe – Frankenstein – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Dracula – The War of the Worlds – Sherlock Holmes – Batman … Continue reading →
Here’s what Anirban Bhattacharya, Antonio Linero, and Chris Oates have to say: Grand Challenge 1: Understanding the Role of Parametrisation Grand Challenge 2: Community Benchmarks Grand Challenge 3: Reliable Assessment of Posterior Approximations They also mention “software support for the … Continue reading →
From The Drowning Swimmer (1992), one of Clive James’s classic essay collections: The best Hitchcock film was directed by someone else. Charade would not be as good as it is if Hitchcock had not developed the genre it epitomises, but … Continue reading →
This came up before: I encountered this book in the library, “Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Selected Journalism 1978-1985,” by Anthony Burgess. It’s just great. I think somebody should collect and print the rest of Burgess’s journalism too. (There do seem … Continue reading →
I was rereading Lord of the Rings the other day and was struck by how real it felt. I mean, sure, it’s fiction, there’s no such thing as trolls etc., but it just had this feeling of “thick description,” the … Continue reading →
Gaurav writes: I just created a small utility to discover retracted articles in your .bib if it is on GitHub. It consults retraction watch DB. Unfortunately the vast vast vast majority of bad papers are not retracted. Even my own … Continue reading →
Paul Alper points us to this news report that states: Two New York University (NYU) professors were recently found to have collaborated directly with executives from the vaping company Juul without disclosing these relationships to academic journals or Congress. This … Continue reading →
This came up in a blog discussion a few years ago. As I wrote at the time: Yeah, people always think I’m being sarcastic or patronizing, but I’m dead serious here. I see this so much, that researchers have strong … Continue reading →
We arXived last year a paper The ARR2 prior: flexible predictive prior definition for Bayesian auto-regressions” with David Kohns, Noa Kallionen, Yann McLatchie, and I (Aki). Last week, we uploaded a revised version. The idea of the paper is to … Continue reading →
(this post is by Charles) Every year, the Flatiron Institute hosts the FWAM meeting. From the website: FWAM (“Flatiron-wide Autumn Meeting”, previously “Flatiron-wide Algorithms and Mathematics”) is a two-day internal conference with the goal of introducing and reviewing scientific and … Continue reading →
Chuck Jackson writes: Last night I was reading the article “The brine of the times” in the 27 September issue of Science magazine and I saw the following text: A key contribution of the approach of Li et al. is … Continue reading →
This is big! Aalto University has total of 5 AI/ML/comp.stat. (note that Bayesian statistics is also considered to be AI by European Union) professor positions at different departments including our CS department: Assistant Professor in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence / … Continue reading →
The above-titled paper from two University of Michigan researchers is published in my new favorite journal, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science: Although psychological research often relies on convenience samples, the most informative participants may be individuals who … Continue reading →
If you know simulation based calibration checking (SBC), you will enjoy our new paper Posterior SBC: Simulation-Based Calibration Checking Conditional on Data with Teemu Säilynoja, Marvin Schmitt, Paul Bürkner, and Aki Vehtari The original SBC checks whether the inference works … Continue reading →
Regular readers will be aware that I’m a big Meg Wolitzer fan (see also here). Her magnum opus was The Interestings, published in 2013, and then a few years later she came out with The Female Persuasion, which was good … Continue reading →
This is Jessica. I’m giving talks this Tuesday and next Tuesday on decision theoretic approaches for combining human domain knowledge with statistical models. I’ll discuss various joint projects with Ziyang Guo, Yifan Wu, and Jason Hartline. Come by if you’re … Continue reading →
Jack Murtagh has lots of interesting math news articles here. I recommend them. But I disagree with his (or his editor’s) claim that the t test is “the most important statistical method in science.” Sure, the t test has been … Continue reading →
Joshua in comments asks: Why are places like Stanford and Johns Hopkins hosting gatherings of well-known coronavirus cranks? My reply: Considering that about half the electorate plans to vote for Donald Trump, who endorses lots of conspiracy theories that are … Continue reading →
Joshua Brooks points us to this news article by Charles Piller, Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion. Maybe this Masliah guy could get a job at UNR? Seriously, though, it makes … Continue reading →
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