Tag Archives: Statistics & Econometrics

Statistik​ — vår tids religion Ingen tvekan råder om att ett helt annat ämne tagit över kontrollen när det gäller utbildningen i vetenskaplig metod inom nästan hela fältet, nämligen statistiken … Värdet hos det statistiska regelsystemet skall naturligtvis inte ifrågasättas, men det skall inte förglömmas att även andra former av reflektion odlas i vetenskapslandet. Inget enskilt ämne kan göra anspråk på hegemoni … John Maynard Keynes … pekar på något som kan...

Hidden Markov Models and Bayes Theorem for dummies  [embedded content]

“Getting philosophical” is not about articulating rarified concepts divorced from statistical practice. It is to provide tools to avoid obfuscating the terms and issues being bandied about … Do I hear a protest? “There is nothing philosophical about our criticism of statistical significance tests (someone might say). The problem is that a small P-value is invariably, and erroneously, interpreted as giving a small probability to the null hypothesis.” Really? P-values are not...

On the​ emptiness of Bayesian probabilism A major attraction of the personalistic [Bayesian] view is that it aims to address uncertainty that is not directly based on statistical data, in the narrow sense of that term​. Clearly much uncertainty is of this broader kind. Yet when we come to specific issues I believe that a snag in the theory emerges. To take an example that concerns me at the moment: what is the evidence that the signals from mobile...

Keynes on the limits​ of econometric methods Am I right in thinking that the method of multiple correlation analysis essentially depends on the economist having furnished, not merely a list of the significant causes, which is correct so far as it goes, but a complete list? For example, suppose three factors are taken into account, it is not enough that these should be in fact vera causa; there must be no other significant factor. If there is a further...

We recommend dropping the NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] paradigm — and the p-value thresholds associated with it — as the default statistical paradigm for research, publication, and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences. Specifically, rather than allowing statistical signicance as determined by p < 0.05 (or some other statistical threshold) to serve as a lexicographic decision rule in scientic publication and statistical decision making more broadly...

Handy missing data methodologies On October 13, 2012, Manny Fernandez reported in The New York Times that former El Paso schools superintendent Lorenzo Garcia was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating​ a testing scandal. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) is a state-mandated test for high-school sophomores. The TAKS missing data algorithm was to treat missing data as missing-at-random, and hence the score for the entire school...

Parachutes do not reduce death when jumping from aircraft Parachute use compared with a backpack control did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when used by participants jumping from aircraft in this first randomized evaluation of the intervention. This largely resulted from our ability to only recruit participants jumping from stationary aircraft on the ground. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community,...

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Statistics is no substitute for thinking The cost of computing has dropped exponentially, but the cost of thinking is what it always was. That is why we see so many articles with so many regressions and so little thought. Zvi Griliches