Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao (1920-2023)

Just heard that C.R. Rao had passed away on Wednesday. Above is a 1941 picture I photographed while attending the jubilee of the Department of Statistics of the University of Calcuta. Showing R.A. Fisher and P.C. Mahalanobis surrounded by faculty and students from the Department. Including a very young Rao who would a few years later go to Cambridge and write a PhD thesis on ANOVA under the supervision of R.A. Fisher. While my own interactions with C.R. Rao have been quite limited, from attending a seminar dinner with him when he visited Purdue University in 1988, to writing a critical assessment of Pitman nearness that he reportedly disliked, to writing chapters in some of the handbooks he edited and a review paper on Rao-Blackwellisation for the International Statistical Review special issue for his 100th birthday (which almost coincided with mine, one day off), he stood as a giant of the field, having impacted statistics and beyond in many and profound ways. The Hindu published an obituary immediately after his death, while Current Science has a longer if older biography full of pictures and Significance a series of articles on “C.R. Rao’s Century”. However, I’d like to recall this quote of his’, acknowledging his mother for his work habits.

‘For instilling in me the quest for knowledge, I owe to my mother, A. Laxmikanthamma, who, in my younger days, woke me up every day at four in the morning and lit the oil lamp for me to study in the quiet hours of the morning when the mind is fresh.’

an hypothetical chain of transmissions

retire statistical significance [follow-up]

[Here is a brief update sent by my coauthors Valentin, Sander, and Blake on events following the Nature comment “Retire Statistical Significance“.]

In the eight months since publication of the comment and of the special issue of The American Statistician, we are glad to see a rich discussion on internet blogs and in scholarly publications and popular media.Nature

One important indication of change is that since March numerous scientific journals have published editorials or revised their author guidelines. We have selected eight editorials that not only discuss statistics reform but give concrete new guidelines to authors. As you will see, the journals differ in how far they want to go with the reform (all but one of the following links are open access).

1) The New England Journal of Medicine, “New Guidelines for Statistical Reporting in the Journal”

2) Pediatric Anesthesia, “Embracing uncertainty: The days of statistical significance are numbered”

3) Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing, “The Push to Move Health Care Science Beyond p < .05“

4) Brain and Neuroscience Advances, “Promoting and supporting credibility in neuroscience”

5) Journal of Wildlife Management, “Vexing Vocabulary in Submissions to the Journal of Wildlife Management”

6) Demographic Research, “P-values, theory, replicability, and rigour”

7) Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, “New Guidelines for Data Reporting and Statistical Analysis: Helping Authors With Transparency and Rigor in Research“

8) Significance, “The S word … and what to do about it”

Further, some of you took part in a survey by Tom Hardwicke and John Ioannidis that was published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation along with editorials by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Mayo.

We replied with a short commentary in that journal, “Statistical Significance Gives Bias a Free Pass“

And finally, joining with the American Statistical Association (ASA), the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) in the United States has also taken up the reform issue.

a statistic with consequences

In the latest Significance, there was a flyer with some members updates, an important one being that Sylvia Richardson had been elected the next president of the Royal Statistical Society. Congratulations to my friend Sylvia! Another item was that the publication of the 2018 RSS Statistic of the Year has led an Australian water company to switch from plastic to aluminum. Hmm, what about switching to nothing and supporting a use-your-own bottle approach? While it is correct that aluminum cans can be 100% made of recycled aluminum, this water company does not seem to appear to make any concerted effort to ensure its can are made of recycled aluminum or to increase the recycling rate for aluminum in Australia towards achieving those of Brazil (92%) or Japan (86%). (Another shocking statistic that could have been added to the 90.5% non-recycled plastic waste [in the World?] is that a water bottle consumes the equivalent of one-fourth of its contents in oil to produce.) Another US water company still promotes water bottles as one of the most effective and inert carbon capture & sequestration methods”..! There is no boundary for green-washing.

impossible estimation

Outside its Sciences & Médecine section that I most often read, Le Monde published last weekend a tribune by the anthropologist Michel Naepels [who kindly replied to my email on his column] on the impossibility to evaluate the number of deaths in Congo due to the political instability (a weak and undemocratic state fighting armed rebel groups), for lack of a reliable sample. With a huge gap between two estimations of this number, from 200,000 to 5.4 million excess deaths. In the later, IRC states that “only 0.4 percent of all deaths across DR Congo were attributed directly to violence”. Still, diverging estimates do not mean numbers are impossible to produce, just that more elaborate methods like those developed by Rebecca Steorts for Syrian deaths must be investigated. Which requires more means than those available to the local States (assuming they are interested in the answer) or to NGOs. This also raises the question whether or not “excess deaths” has an absolute meaning, since it refers to an hypothetical state of the world that has not taken place.

On the same page, another article written by geographers shed doubt on predictive policing software, not used in France, if not so clearly as in the Significance article by Kristian Lum and William Isaac last year.