Publications by dan
Navigate the Bermuda Triangle of Mediation Analysis
MYTHS AND TRUTHS ABOUT AN OFTEN-USED, LITTLE-UNDERSTOOD STATISTICAL PROCEDURE If you go to a consumer research conference, you will hear tales of how experiments have undergone particular statistical rites: the attainment of the elusive crossover interaction, the demonstration of full mediation through Baron and Kenny’s sacred procedure, and s...
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The counterfactual GPS!
WHAT IF YOUR GPS TOLD YOU WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HAD TAKEN THE OTHER ROUTE? Not long ago, your Decision Science News editor was planning a trip to a book group meeting along with another member. The monthly book group takes place in Cove Neck Long Island, about an hour East of Manhattan. Given the starting point (see map), the two had a...
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Which chart is better?
CHART CRITICS, GRAPHICS CURMUDGEONS, COME ONE COME ALL Once upon a time there was this graph (graph 1). Andrew Gelman went all graphics curmudgeon on it, calling it an “ugly, sloppy bit of data graphics“, so it became this graph (graph 2). Now the question is, which is better: graph 2 or graph 3? Please use the comments and logic. Thank y...
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Birds of a feather shop together
PREDICTING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR FROM SOCIAL NETWORKS This week, Decision Science News is doing a special cross-posting with Messy Matters. The post below is by Sharad Goel and describes work that he and your Decision Science News editor Dan Goldstein are jointly undertaking at Yahoo! Do you know what the #$*! your social media strategy is? Perhaps ...
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Visualizations of US neighborhoods by race and ethnicity
HOMOPHILY + MAPS WITHOUT MAPPING SOFTWARE In the past, Decision Science News has posted about homophily (“birds of a feather shop together“) and cool, lightweight visualizations (“maps without map packages in R“). Today, both topics come together in Eric Fischer’s fascinating set of images on Flickr called “Race and Ethnicity”(*).�...
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Some ideas on communicating risks to the general public
SOME EMPIRICAL BASES FOR CHOOSING CERTAIN RISK REPRESENTATIONS OVER OTHERS This week DSN posts some thoughts (largely inspired by the work of former colleagues Stephanie Kurzenhäuser, Ralph Hertwig, Ulrich Hoffrage, and Gerd Gigerenzer) about communicating risks to the general public, providing references and delicious downloads where possible....
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Once again, chart critics and graph gurus welcome
HOW TO DISPLAY A LINE PLOT WITH COUNT INFORMATION? In a previously-mentioned paper Sharad and your DSN editor are writing up, there is the above line plot with points. The area of each point shows the count of observations. It’s done in R with ggplot2 (hooray for Hadley). We generally like this type of plot, however, we are concerned about whe...
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Area plots unmasked
RESULTS OF THE GREAT AREA PLOT QUIZ If you are the type of reader who remembers things from last week, you may remember the great area plot quiz we had running. This week, we are excited to announce that the results are in. The plot above shows answers to the four questions. The correct answers are indicated with the green lines. Remember, in ea...
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The housing bubble by city
DIFFERENT CITIES TELL DIFFERENT STORIES Inspired by a tutorial called 5 Minute Analysis in R: Case-Shiller Indices, we decided to redo the analysis with 1) More up to date data and 2) Hadley Wickham’s super ggplot2 graphics package. The above plot shows the general trend in home prices, relative to January 2000, in various cities, but is other...
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Best graph ever
LARGEST EVER DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 328 and 327 SPOTTED IN NEW YORK CITY Decision Science News was amused to see the above advertisement while riding to work. If the bottom of the bars is zero, and the metro bar is correctly labelled, the amNY bar is at 240,000. We used PlotDigitizer to steal the points from the graph. This is without doubt the best...
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