Publications by Qin Shen
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Chapter 8 - Conditional Manatees This chapter introduced interactions, which allow for the association between a predictor and an outcome to depend upon the value of another predictor. While you can’t see them in a DAG, interactions can be important for making accurate inferences. Interactions can be difficult to interpret, and so the chapter a...
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Chapter 6 - The Haunted DAG & The Causal Terror Multiple regression is no oracle, but only a golem. It is logical, but the relationships it describes are conditional associations, not causal influences. Therefore additional information, from outside the model, is needed to make sense of it. This chapter presented introductory examples of some com...
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Chapter 5 - Many Variables and Spurious Waffles This chapter introduced multiple regression, a way of constructing descriptive models for how the mean of a measurement is associated with more than one predictor variable. The defining question of multiple regression is: What is the value of knowing each predictor, once we already know the other pr...
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Chapter 7 - Ulysses’ Compass The chapter began with the problem of overfitting, a universal phenomenon by which models with more parameters fit a sample better, even when the additional parameters are meaningless. Two common tools were introduced to address overfitting: regularizing priors and estimates of out-of-sample accuracy (WAIC and PSIS)...
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Chapter 9 - Markov Chain Monte Carlo This chapter has been an informal introduction to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation. The goal has been to introduce the purpose and approach MCMC algorithms. The major algorithms introduced were the Metropolis, Gibbs sampling, and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithms. Each has its advantages and disadva...
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Chapter 12 - Monsters and Mixtures This chapter introduced several new types of regression, all of which are generalizations of generalized linear models (GLMs). Ordered logistic models are useful for categorical outcomes with a strict ordering. They are built by attaching a cumulative link function to a categorical outcome distribution. Zero-inf...
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Chapter 14 - Adventures in Covariance This chapter extended the basic multilevel strategy of partial pooling to slopes as well as intercepts. Accomplishing this meant modeling covariation in the statistical population of parameters. The LKJcorr prior was introduced as a convenient family of priors for correlation matrices. You saw how covariance ...
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