Progress in 2023

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9 thoughts on “Progress in 2023

    • Jd:

      I love all my children equally!

      But, yeah, the causal quartets paper was particularly satisfying because I just had the idea one day, close to fully formed, and was able to write it up right away—and then had the luck to have two excellent collaborators who made it even better. While revising the paper for publication, we needed to remove some material on specifying average effects, and we’re spinning that off into another short paper. My only regret is that American Statistician doesn’t get the readership it used to: back in the day when we received journals in the mail, the American Statistician was the most readable journal, and people would open it up and take a look right away. Nowadays we need to spread the word through social media nd word-of-mouth.

      I also love the short paper, “Before data analysis,” which some colleagues and I are hoping to use as a starting point for something more systematic on designing studies.

      And I think the “Two truths a lie” paper is a real gem. It’s one of the 52 activities in my forthcoming Active Statistics book with Aki. The review process was super-helpful and allowed me to improve the activity in various ways. We could easily have spun off 100 papers from that new book, but that would’ve taken a lot of work so I just did that one.

      Of my recent unpublished papers, my favorite is the very first one listed above, on incorporating sampling weights into Bayesian regression. It provides the solution to a problem that’s been bugging me for about two decades. I guess I can’t say for sure that I love the paper, because the method might not work out in real applications, but I have some hopes!

      I could go on . . .

      Every paper has its own story. In my spare time I’m preparing a long article with a paragraph describing where each of my papers came from. Even readers who are not interested in thirty-year-old statistics papers might find some interest in the processes of research and collaboration.

      • Cool. I just read both the ‘Before data analysis’ and ‘Two truths and a lie’ paper.

        I’ve tried to incorporate the ideas in the ‘Before data analysis’ paper into my own workflow. In my experience, the seemingly obvious advice of, “First, set up your design and data collection to measure what you want to learn about” is often ignored! I’ve come to think that maybe every measure is really a proxy for whatever it is one really wants to know. Even in a lab setting, it isn’t as straightforward as one might think. It is actually pretty difficult to collect data that is actually measuring what one wants to know. Of course, I think researchers are also tempted to squeeze every drop out of the data that they already have, and maybe sometimes the papers appear disconnected from the study because it was never designed for the paper that was written in the first place!

        This is probably a terrible idea, but maybe you could adapt your ‘Two truths and a lie’ activity to a (not remote) conference talk (of reasonable size)? You could put up 2 truths and a lie from yourself, Aki, Bob, Lauren, Jessica, etc on the screen and have the audience vote thumbs up or down. Your rough guess at number thumbs up or down would now make up both the truth/lie (majority rule) and the certainty metric (rough proportion of thumbs up or down). You would fill out the Google doc on screen. If nothing else, it would certainly introduce the concept of measurement error to data collection.

  1. hi Andrew, did you know that you’re an author on this fabulous paper from Tom Ward et al?

    Bayesian spatial modelling of localised SARS-CoV-2 transmission through mobility networks across England
    T. Ward, M. Morris, A. Gelman, B. Carpenter, W. Ferguson, C. Overton, and M. Fyles
    PLOS Computational Biology 19 e1011580– (2023)
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011580

  2. Hi Andrew. This is a great article! [2023] A new look at p-values for randomized clinical trials. {\em NEJM Evidence}. However, notice that the lines in Figure 1 are reversed.

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