anti xkcd Some of you may have noticed that the recent installment of the always entertaining web comic, xkcd, had a statistical theme with a decidedly anti-frequentist flavor: see here. In the interest of balance, here is my (admittedly crude) attem...
Betting and Elections The winner of yesterday’s election was … statistics. While bloviating pundits went on and on about how close the election was going to be, some people actually used statistics to forecast the outcome. Perhaps the most famous election quant is Nate Silver. (I’ll be writing more about Nate Silver in a few [...]
Judea Pearl asked me to post the following announcement: Dear friends in causality research, I think you will be pleased to know that the American Statistical Association has announced a new Prize, “Causality in Statistics Education”, aimed to encourage the teaching of basic causal inference in introductory statistics courses. The motivations for the prize are [...]
The Future of Machine Learning (and the End of the World?) On Thursday (Oct 25) we had an event called the ML Futuristic Panel Discussion. The panelists were Ziv Bar-Joseph, Steve Fienberg, Tom Mitchell Aarti Singh and Alex Smola. Ziv is an expert on machine learning and systems biology. Steve is a colleague of mine [...]
The Inside Story of the L’Aquila Affair On April 6 2009 a major earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy killed hundreds of people. On October 22 2012, seven people were convicted of manslaughter for downplaying the likelihood of a major earthquake six days before it took place. I don’t think that the scientists and engineers in Italy [...]
Before I started this blog, I posted an essay on my webpage about refereeing called A World Without Referees. There was a bit of discussion about it on the blogosphere. I argued that our peer review system is outdated and unfair. David Banks has raised this issue here in the Amstat News. Karl Rohe also [...]
Proof That Theory Matters The title of this post is a slight exaggeration but I do want to discuss an interesting paper by Steve Stigler that provides empirical support for the fact that: … there is a tendency for influence to flow from theory to applications to a much greater extent than in the reverse [...]
The Robins-Ritov Example: A Post-Mortem This post is follow-up to the two earlier posts on the Robins-Ritov example. We don’t want to prolong the debate but, rather, just summarize our main points. 1. Summary The Horwitz-Thompson estimator satisfies the following condition: for every , where — the parameter space — is the set of all [...]
Recently, there was a discussion on stack exchange about an example in my book. The example is a paradox about estimating normalizing constants. The analysis of the problem in my book is wrong; more precisely, the analysis is my book is meant to show that just blindly applying Bayes’ rule does not always yield a [...]
In the olden days, multiple testing meant testing 8 or 9 hypotheses. Today, multiple testing can involve testing thousands or even million of hypotheses. A revolution occurred with the publication of Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). The method introduced in that paper has made it feasible to test huge numbers of hypotheses with high power. The [...]
