Publications by andrew
Weighting and prediction in sample surveys
A couple years ago Rod Little was invited to write an article for the diamond jubilee of the Calcutta Statistical Association Bulletin. His article was published with discussions from Danny Pfefferman, J. N. K. Rao, Don Rubin, and myself. Here it all is.I’ll paste my discussion below, but it’s worth reading the others’ perspectives too. E...
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Experimental reasoning in social science
As a statistician, I was trained to think of randomized experimentation as representing the gold standard of knowledge in the social sciences, and, despite having seen occasional arguments to the contrary, I still hold that view, expressed pithily by Box, Hunter, and Hunter (1978) that “To find out what happens when you change something, it is ...
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Questions about quantum computing
I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of q...
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Different goals, different looks: Infovis and the Chris Rock effect
Seth writes:Here’s my candidate for bad graphic of the year:I [Seth] studied it and learned nothing. I have no idea how they assigned colors to locations. I already knew that there were more within-city calls than calls to individual distant locations — for example that there are more SF-SF calls than SF-LA calls. The researchers took a huge ...
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Early stopping and penalized likelihood
Maximum likelihood gives the beat fit to the training data but in general overfits, yielding overly-noisy parameter estimates that don’t perform so well when predicting new data. A popular solution to this overfitting problem takes advantage of the iterative nature of most maximum likelihood algorithms by stopping early. In general, an iterat...
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Descriptive statistics, causal inference, and story time
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 ...
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The virtues of incoherence?
Kent Osband writes:I just read your article The holes in my philosophy of Bayesian data analysis. I agree on the importance of what you flagged as “comparable incoherence in all other statistical philosophies”. The problem arises when a string of unexpected observations persuades that one’s original structural hypothesis (which might be vie...
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Blog in motion
In the next few days we’ll be changing the format of the blog and moving it to a new server. If you have difficulty posting comments, just wait and post them in a few days when all should be working well. (But if you can post a comment, go for it. All the old entries and comments should be reappearing in the reconstituted blog.) Related To...
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R on the cloud
Just as scientists should never really have to think much about statistics, I feel that, in an ideal world, statisticians would never have to worry about computing. In the real world, though, we have to spend a lot of time building our own tools.It would be great if we could routinely run R with speed and memory limitations being less of a conce...
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Looking for NppToR beta testers.
I’m very happy to announce that there are great changes coming to NppToR. There are a few changes under the hood but the biggest change is the announcement of a new feature I call quick keys. Quick keys lets you define your own commands for easy evaluation in R. For example, the help command has been moved to the quick keys. It is still c...
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