Something came up in comments today that I’d like to follow up on. In our earlier post, I brought up an example: If you’re modeling attitudes about gun control, think hard about what state-level predictors to include. My colleagues and I thought about this a bunch of years ago when doing MRP for gun-control attitudes. […]
Archive of posts filed under the Bayesian Statistics category.
Some issues when using MRP to model attitudes on a gun control attitude question on a 1–4 scale
Elliott Morris writes: – I want to run a MRP model predicting 4 categories of response options to a question about gun control (multinomial logit) – I want to control for demographics in the standard hierarchical way (MRP) – I want the coefficients to evolve in a random walk over time, as I have data […]
Discuss our new R-hat paper for the journal Bayesian Analysis!
Here’s your opportunity: We welcome public contributions to the Discussion of the manuscript the manuscript Rank-normalization, folding, and localization: An improved R-hat for assessing convergence of MCMC by A. Vehtari, A. Gelman, D. Simpson, B. Carpenter and P. C. Bürkner, which will be featured as a Discussion Paper in the June 2021 issue of the […]
More background on our research on constructing an informative prior from a corpus of comparable studies
Erik van Zwet writes: The post (“The Shrinkage Trilogy: How to be Bayesian when analyzing simple experiments”) didn’t get as many comments as I’d hoped, so I wrote an short explainer and a reading guide to help people understand what we’re up to. All three papers have the same very simple model. We abstract a […]
Many years ago, when he was a baby economist . . .
Jonathan Falk writes: Many years ago, when I was a baby economist, a fight broke out in my firm between two economists. There was a question as to whether a particular change in the telecommunications laws had spurred productivity improvements or not. There a trend of x% per year in productivity improvements that had gone […]
Priors for counts in binomial and multinomial models
Frank Tuyl writes: I was hoping to get your opinion on something. I’ve always been a fan of E.T. Jaynes, so really appreciate what Larry Bretthorst did to get his book out there posthumously. But are you aware of this paper of his? A friend and colleague of mine is getting right into it and […]
How to figure out what went wrong with this model?
Tony Hu writes: Could you please help look at an example of my model fitting? I used a very flexible model—Bayesian multivariate adaptive regression spline. The result is as follows: I fitted the corn yield data with multiple predictors for counties of the US (the figure shows results of Belmont County in Ohio). My advisor […]
PhD student and postdoc positions in Norway for doing Bayesian causal inference using Stan!
Guido Biele writes: I have two positions for a postdoc and PhD student open in a project where we will use observational data from Norwegian National registries, structural models (or the potential outcomes framework, the main thing is that we want to think systematically about identification), and Bayesian estimation in Stan to estimate causal effects […]
Webinar: On Bayesian workflow
This post is by Eric. This Wednesday, at 12 pm ET, Aki Vehtari is stopping by to talk to us about Bayesian workflow. You can register here. Abstract We will discuss some parts of the Bayesian workflow with a focus on the need and justification for an iterative process. The talk is partly based on […]
Bayesian methods and what they offer compared to classical econometrics
A well-known economist who wishes to remain anonymous writes: Can you write about this agent? He’s getting exponentially big on Twitter. The link is to an econometrician, Jeffrey Wooldridge, who writes: Many useful procedures—shrinkage, for example—can be derived from a Bayesian perspective. But those estimators can be studied from a frequentist perspective, and no strong […]
The Mets are hiring
Des McGowan writes: We are looking to hire multiple full time analysts/senior analysts to join the Baseball Analytics department at the New York Mets. The roles will involve building, testing, and presenting statistical models that inform decision-making in all facets of Baseball Operations. These positions require a strong background in complex statistics and data analytics, […]
Postdoc in precision medicine at Johns Hopkins using Bayesian methods
Aki Nishimura writes: My colleague Scott Zeger and I have a postdoc position for our precision medicine initiative at Johns Hopkins and we are looking for expertise in Bayesian methods, statistical computation, or software development. Expertise in Stan would be a plus!
Postdoc in Paris for Bayesian models in genetics . . . differential equation models in Stan
Julie Bertrand writes: The BIPID team in the IAME UMR1137 INSERM Université de Paris is opening a one-year postdoctoral position to develop Bayesian approaches to high throughput genetic analyses using nonlinear mixed effect models. The candidate will analyse longitudinal phenotype data using differential equation models on clinical trial data with Stan and perform simulation studies […]
Is the right brain hemisphere more analog and Bayesian?
Oliver Schultheiss writes: I recently commented one of your posts (I forgot which one) with a reference to evidence suggesting that the right brain hemisphere may be in a better position to handle numbers and probabilistic predictions. Yesterday I came across the attached paper by Filipowicz, Anderson, & Danckert (2016) that may be of some […]
Webinar: Some Outstanding Challenges when Solving ODEs in a Bayesian context
This post is by Eric. This Wednesday, at 12 pm ET, Charles Margossian is stopping by to talk to us about solving ODEs using Bayesian methods. You can register here. If you want to get a feel for the types of issues he will be discussing, take a look at his (and Andrew’s) recent case […]
Come work with me and David Shor !
Open positions on our progressive data team: Machine Learning engineer – https://grnh.se/6713732b4us Software Engineer – https://grnh.se/15ee5a2e4us Devops – https://grnh.se/aa2bef714us We are a diverse team of engineers, data scientists, statisticians, and political insiders who are closely connected to some of the most important decision makers in the progressive ecosystem. We worked with central players to develop strategy and direct […]
“Maybe we should’ve called it Arianna”
Katie Hafner wrote this obituary of Arianna Rosenbluth, original programmer of what is known as the Metropolis algorithm: Arianna Rosenbluth Dies at 93; Pioneering Figure in Data Science Dr. Rosenbluth, who received her physics Ph.D. at 21, helped create an algorithm that has became a foundation of understanding huge quantities of data. She died of […]
How to track covid using hospital data collection and MRP
Len Covello, Yajuan Si, and I write: The current way we track the prevalence of coronavirus infections is deeply flawed. Ideally, health officials would test random samples of citizens in each community in a systematic way. But throughout the pandemic, the United States has lacked the political will or funding to pursue it. Instead, testing […]
New research suggests: “Targeting interventions – including transmission-blocking vaccines – to adults aged 20-49 is an important consideration in halting resurgent epidemics and preventing COVID-19-attributable deaths.”
In recent weeks we’ve been hearing a lot about the priority of vaccinations. Should we be vaccinating older people first? Essential workers? Just vaccinate as many as possible without worrying about who gets it? Giving out the vaccine is partly about protecting people and partly about slowing the chains of transmission. The results of a […]
About that claim that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived”
A couple people pointed me to this article, “A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived.” It is hard for me to assess this document, as the key issues involve the biology of the virus, and I don’t know anything about genetics. There […]