Archive for causality
Bayesian basics in Le Monde
Posted in Statistics with tags Bayes theorem, causality, COVID-19, False positive, Le Monde, medical statistics, pandemic on September 12, 2020 by xi'an[The Art of] Regression and other stories
Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags Aki Vehtari, amazon associates, Americanisms, Andrew Gelman, book review, C.R. Rao, Cambridge University Press, causality, cum grano salis, cup, garden, glm, instrumental variables, Jennifer Hill, non-response, political science, R, robustness, stan_glm, US elections 2016 on July 23, 2020 by xi'anCoI: Andrew sent me this new book [scheduled for 23 July on amazon] of his with Jennifer Hill and Aki Vehtari. Which I read in my garden over a few sunny morns. And as Andrew and Aki are good friends on mine, this review is definitely subjective and biased! Hence to take with a spoonful of salt.
The “other stories’ in the title is a very nice touch. And a clever idea. As the construction of regression models comes as a story to tell, from gathering and checking the data, to choosing the model specifications, to analysing the output and setting the safety lines on its interpretation and usages. I added “The Art of” in my own title as the exercise sounds very much like an art and very little like a technical or even less mathematical practice. Even though the call to the resident stat_glm R function is ubiquitous.
The style itself is very story-like, very far from a mathematical statistics book as, e.g., C.R. Rao’s Linear Statistical Inference and Its Applications. Or his earlier Linear Models which I got while drafted in the Navy. While this makes the “Stories” part most relevant, I also wonder how I could teach from this book to my own undergrad students without acquiring first (myself) the massive expertise represented by the opinions and advice on what is correct and what is not in constructing and analysing linear and generalised linear models. In the sense that I would find justifying or explaining opinionated sentences an amathematical challenge. On the other hand, it would make for a great remote course material, leading the students through the many chapters and letting them experiment with the code provided therein, creating new datasets and checking modelling assumptions. The debate between Bayesian and likelihood solutions is quite muted, with a recommendation for weakly informative priors superseded by the call for exploring the impact of one’s assumption. (Although the horseshoe prior makes an appearance, p.209!) The chapter on math and probability is somewhat superfluous as I hardly fathom a reader entering this book without a certain amount of math and stats background. (While the book warns about over-trusting bootstrap outcomes, I find the description in the Simulation chapter a wee bit too vague.) The final chapters about causal inference are quite impressive in their coverage but clearly require a significant amount of investment from the reader to truly ingest these 110 pages.
“One thing that can be confusing in statistics is that similar analyses can be performed in different ways.” (p.121)
Unsurprisingly, the authors warn the reader about simplistic and unquestioning usages of linear models and software, with a particularly strong warning about significance. (Remember Abandon Statistical Significance?!) And keep (rightly) arguing about the importance of fake data comparisons (although this can be overly confident at times). Great Chapter 11 on assumptions, diagnostics and model evaluation. And terrific Appendix B on 10 pieces of advice for improving one’s regression model. Although there are two or three pages on the topic, at the very end, I would have also appreciated a more balanced and constructive coverage of machine learning as it remains a form of regression, which can be evaluated by simulation of fake data and assessed by X validation, hence quite within the range of the book.
The document reads quite well, even pleasantly once one is over the shock at the limited amount of math formulas!, my only grumble being a terrible handwritten graph for building copters(Figure 1.9) and the numerous and sometimes gigantic square root symbols throughout the book. At a more meaningful level, it may feel as somewhat US centric, at least given the large fraction of examples dedicated to US elections. (Even though restating the precise predictions made by decent models on the eve of the 2016 election is worthwhile.) The Oscar for the best section title goes to “Cockroaches and the zero-inflated negative binomial model” (p.248)! But overall this is a very modern, stats centred, engaging and careful book on the most common tool of statistical modelling! More stories to come maybe?!
statistics in Nature [a tale of the two Steves]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics with tags Bayesian Analysis, causality, clinical trials, frequentism, Nature, p-value hacking, placebo effect, statistical evidence, Stephen Senn, variability on January 15, 2019 by xi'anIn the 29 November issue of Nature, Stephen Senn (formerly at Glasgow) wrote an article about the pitfalls of personalized medicine, for the statistics behind the reasoning are flawed.
“What I take issue with is the de facto assumption that the differential response to a drug is consistent for each individual, predictable and based on some stable property, such as a yet-to-be-discovered genetic variant.”S. Senn
One (striking) reason being that the studies rest on a sort of low-level determinism that does not account for many sources of variability. Over-confidence in causality results. Stephen argues that improvement lies in insisting on repeated experiments on the same subjects (with an increased challenge in modelling since this requires longitudinal models with dependent observations). And to “drop the use of dichotomies”, favouring instead continuous modeling of measurements.
And in the 6 December issue, Steven Goodman calls (in the World view tribune) for probability statements to be attached as confidence indices to scientific claims. That he takes great pain to distinguish from p-values and links with Bayesian analysis. (Bayesian analysis that Stephen regularly objects to.) While I applaud the call, I am quite pessimistic about the follow-up it will generate, the primary reply being that posterior probabilities can be manipulated as well as p-values. And that Bayesian probabilities are not “real” probabilities (dixit Don Fraser or Deborah Mayo).
Dutch book for sleeping beauty
Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags Bansky, BFF4, causality, Cindirella, decision theory, Dutch book, evidential decision theory, Harvard University, sleeping beauty paradox on May 15, 2017 by xi'anAfter my short foray in Dutch book arguments two weeks ago in Harvard, I spotted a recent arXival by Vincent Conitzer analysing the sleeping beauty paradox from a Dutch book perspective. (The paper “A Dutch book against sleeping beauties who are evidential decision theorists” actually appeared in Synthese two years ago, which makes me wonder why it comes out only now on arXiv. And yes I am aware the above picture is about Bansky’s Cindirella and not sleeping beauty!)
“if Beauty is an evidential decision theorist, then in variants where she does not always have the same information available to her upon waking, she is vulnerable to Dutch books, regardless of whether she is a halfer or a thirder.”
As recalled in the introduction of the paper, there exist ways to construct Dutch book arguments against thirders and halfers alike. Conitzer constructs a variant that also distinguishes between a causal and an evidential decision theorist (sleeping beauty), the later being susceptible to another Dutch book. Which is where I get lost as I have no idea of a distinction between those two types of decision theory. Quickly checking on Wikipedia returned the notion that the latter decision theory maximises the expected utility conditional on the decision, but this does not clarify the issue in that it seems to imply the decision impacts the probability of the event… Hence keeping me unable to judge of the relevance of the arguments therein (which is no surprise since only based on a cursory read).