Kaiser Fung points to this news article by David Jackson and Gary Marx: The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services is ending a high-profile program that used computer data mining to identify children at risk for serious injury or death after the agency’s top official called the technology unreliable. . . . Two Florida […] The post Flaws in stupid horrible algorithm revealed because it made numerical predictions appeared…
Paul Alper points us to this article in Health News Review—I can’t figure out who wrote it—warning of problems with the use of surrogate outcomes for policy evaluation: “New drug improves bone density by 40%.” At first glance, this sounds like great news. But there’s a problem: We have no idea if this means the […] The post Problems with surrogate markers appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
Daniel Kapitan writes: We are in the process of writing a paper on the outcome of cataract surgery. A (very rough!) draft can be found here, to provide you with some context: https://www.overleaf.com/read/wvnwzjmrffmw. Using standard classification methods (Python sklearn, with synthetic oversampling to address the class imbalance), we are able to predict a poor outcome […] The post Answering the question, What predictors are more important?, going beyond p-value thresholding…
So. Following up on our discussion of “the 80% power lie,” I was thinking about the implicit model underlying NIH’s 80% power rule. Several commenters pointed out that, to have your study design approved by NSF, it’s not required that you demonstrate that you have 80% power for real; what’s needed is to show 80% […] The post Power analysis and NIH-style statistical practice: What’s the implicit model? appeared first…
Commenting on this post on the “80% power” lie, Roger Bohn writes: The low power problem bugged me so much in the semiconductor industry that I wrote 2 papers about around 1995. Variability estimates come naturally from routine manufacturing statistics, which in semicon were tracked carefully because they are economically important. The sample size is […] The post Chasing the noise in industrial A/B testing: what to do when all…
Some people asked me what I thought about this story. A reporter wrote to me about it last week, asking if it looked like fraud. Here’s my reply: Based on the description, there does not seem to be the implication of fraud. The editor’s report mentioned “protocol deviations, including the enrollment of participants who were […] The post About that quasi-retracted study on the Mediterranean diet . . . appeared…
What: A one-day event organized by France Mentre (IAME, INSERM, Univ SPC, Univ Paris 7, Univ Paris 13) and Julie Bertrand (INSERM) and sponsored by the International Society of Pharmacometrics (ISoP). When: Tuesday 24 July 2018 Where: Faculté Bichat, 16 rue Henri Huchard, 75018 Paris Free Registration: Registration is being handled by ISoP; please click […] The post Stan Workshop on Pharmacometrics—Paris, 24 July 2018 appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
Bill Jefferys sends along this excellent newspaper article by Siddhartha Mukherjee, “A failure to heal,” about the necessity—and the difficulty—of admitting failure in research and clinical practice. Mukherjee writes: What happens when a clinical trial fails? This year, the Food and Drug Administration approved some 40 new medicines to treat human illnesses, including 13 for […] The post The necessity—and the difficulty—of admitting failure in research and clinical practice appeared…
I just read this horrifying magazine article by Patrick Radden Keefe: The Family That Built an Empire of Pain: The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts. You really have to read the whole thing, because it’s just one story after another of bad behavior, people getting rich […] The post Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, and the FDA appeared first on…
I just read this horrifying magazine article by Patrick Radden Keefe: The Family That Built an Empire of Pain: The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts. You really have to read the whole thing, because it’s just one story after another of bad behavior, people getting rich […] The post Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, and the FDA appeared first on…
