Fri 3 May 2024, 11am at Chambers Hall, Ruan Conference Room – lower level: Audience Choice: Bayesian Workflow / Causal Generalization / Modeling of Sampling Weights The audience is invited to choose among three possible talks: Bayesian Workflow: The workflow … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Robert Stewart, of Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), who we met at StanCon, is looking to fill the following role: ORNL Job ad: Group Leader for Spatial Statistics It’s a research group leader position with an emphasis on published research … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Gaurav Sood writes: Often enough, scientists are left with the unenviable task of conducting an orchestra with out-of-tune instruments. They are charged with telling a coherent story about noisy results. Scientists defer to the demand partly because there is a … Continue reading … | Continue reading

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to evaluate MCMC samplers. A common way to do this is to run one or more iterations of your contender against a baseline of something simple, something well understood, or more rarely, the … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Adam Connor-Sax sent this question to Philip Greengard: Do you or anyone you know work with or know about (human) population forecasting in small geographies (election districts) and short timescales (2-20 years)? I can imagine just looking at the past … Continue reading → | Continue reading

It’s the eternal question . . . what do you want, if given these three options: (a) 54 Jamaican beef patties (b) 1/216 of a conference featuring a collection of washed-up business executives, academics, politicians, and hangers-on (c) A soggy … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Emily Tanner-Smith writes: Remote/Hybrid Postdoc Opportunity—join us as a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice in the College of Education at the University of Oregon! The HEDCO Institute specializes in the conduct of evidence synth … | Continue reading

Substack. Twitter. Bluesky. The blog itself. Also, our old posts are spooling at StatRetro every three hours starting with our very first post from 2004. The blog’s in all these places because people told me they were having difficulty staying … Continue reading → | Continue reading

After writing this post, I was thinking that my superpower as a researcher is my willingness to admit I’m wrong, which gives me many opportunities to learn and do better (see for example here or here). My other superpower is … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Fri 26 Apr, 10am in Shriver Hall Boardroom and 2pm in Hodson Hall 213 (see also here): Storytelling and Scientific Understanding Andrew Gelman and Thomas Basbøll Storytelling is central to science, not just as a tool for broadcasting scientific findings … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Sean Manning points to this remark from Matthew “not the musician” White: I [White] am sometimes embarrassed by where I have been forced to find my statistics … Often, the only place to find numbers is in a newspaper article, … Continue reading → | Continue reading

This came up in a discussion thread a few years ago. In response to some thoughts from Danielle Navarro about the importance of model checking, I wrote: This makes me think of an analogy between the following two things: – … Continue reading → | Continue reading

James Heathers reports on the article, “Contagion or restitution? When bad apples can motivate ethical behavior,” by Gino, Gu, and Zhong (2009): There is some sentiment data reported in Experiment 3, which seems to be reported in whole units. They … Continue reading → | Continue reading

I came across this post from 2011, “Infovis, infographics, and data visualization: Where I’m coming from, and where I’d like to go,” and it seemed to make sense to reassess where we are now, 12 years later. From 2011: I … Continue reading → | Continue reading

I’m coding up a new adaptive sampler in Python, which is super exciting (the basic methodology is due to Nawaf Bou-Rabee and Tore Kleppe). Luckily for me, another great colleague, Edward Roualdes, has been keeping me on the straight and … Continue reading → | Continue reading

It’s standard practice in research articles as well as editorials in scholarly journals to present just one side of an issue. That’s how it’s done! A typical research article looks like this: “We found X. Yes, we really found X. … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Enjoy. They looked at least 12 cognitive outcomes, one of which had p = 0.02, but other differences “were just shy of statistical significance.” Also: The degree of change in the brain measure was not significantly correlated with the degree … Continue reading → | Continue reading

James “not the cancer cure guy” Watson writes: This letter by Thorland et al. published in the New England Journal of Medicine is rather amusing. It’s unclear to me what their point is, other than the fact that they find … Continue reading → | Continue reading

I had dinner a few nights ago with Andrew’s former postdoc Aleks Jakulin, who left the green fields of academia for entrepreneurship ages ago. Aleks was telling me he was impressed by the new LLMs, but then asserted that they’re … Continue reading → | Continue reading

I keep worrying, as with a loose tooth, about news media elites who are going for the UFOs-as-space-aliens theory. This one falls halfway between election denial (too upsetting for me to want to think about too often) and belief in … Continue reading → | Continue reading

19 W 4th Street, Room 517: How large is that treatment effect, really? Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University “Unbiased estimates” aren’t really unbiased, for a bunch of reasons, including aggregation, selection, extrapola … | Continue reading

Ron Bloom points us to this wonderful article, “The Ethics of Belief,” by the mathematician William Clifford, also known for Clifford algebras. The article is related to some things I’ve written about evidence vs. truth (see here and here) but … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Ron Bloom points us to this wonderful article, “The Ethics of Belief,” by the mathematician William Clifford, also known for Clifford algebras. The article is related to some things I’ve written about evidence vs. truth (see here and here) but … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Here’s something from from Witold’s slides on baggr, an R package (built on Stan) that does hierarchical modeling for meta-analysis: Overall goals: 1. Implement all basic meta-analysis models and tools 2. Focus on accessibility, model criticism and comparison 3. Help … Continue r … | Continue reading

This is Jessica. How to weigh metascience or statistical reform proposals has been on my mind more than usual lately as a result of looking into and blogging about the Protzko et al. paper on rigor-enhancing practices. Seems it’s also … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Erling Rognli writes: I just wanted to bring your attention to a positive stats story, in case you’d want to feature it on the blog. A major journal in my field (the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry) has over … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Someone pointed me to this post from Jonatan Pallesen: Frequently, when I [Pallesen] look into a discussed scientific paper, I find out that it is astonishingly bad. • I looked into Claudine Gay’s 2001 paper to check a specific thing, … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Before going on, let me emphasize that, yes, modern AI is absolutely amazing—self-driving cars, machines that can play ping-pong, chessbots, computer programs that write sonnets, the whole deal! Call it machine intelligence or whatever, it’s amazing. What I’m getting at … Continu … | Continue reading

Following our recent post on the latest Dishonestygate scandal, we got into a discussion of the challenges of simulating fake data and performing a pre-analysis before conducting an experiment. You can see it all in the comments to that post—but … Continue reading → | Continue reading

There is a new paper in arXiv: “Supporting Bayesian modelling workflows with iterative filtering for multiverse analysis” by Anna Elisabeth Riha, Nikolas Siccha, Antti Oulasvirta, and Aki Vehtari. Anna writes An essential component of Bayesian workflows is the iteration within … … | Continue reading

I’ll be speaking twice at Carnegie Mellon soon. CMU statistics seminar, Fri 5 Apr 2024, 2:15pm, in Doherty Hall A302: Bayesian Workflow: Some Progress and Open Questions The workflow of applied Bayesian statistics includes not just inference but also model … Continue reading → | Continue reading

A recent issue of the New Yorker had two striking stories of bad parenting. Margaret Talbot reported on a child/adolescent-care center in Austria from the 1970s that was run by former Nazis who were basically torturing the kids. This happened … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Dean Eckles sent me an email with subject line, “Another Perry Preschool paper . . .” and this link to a recent research paper that reports, “We find statistically significant effects of the program on a number of different outcomes … Continue reading → | Continue reading

Awhile ago, Kevin Lewis pointed me to this article that was featured in the Wall Street Journal. Lewis’s reaction was, “I’m not sure how robust this is with just some generic survey controls. I’d like to see more of an … Continue reading → | Continue reading