## exoplanets at 99.999…%

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on January 22, 2016 by xi'an

The latest Significance has a short article providing some coverage of the growing trend in the discovery of exoplanets, including new techniques used to detect those expoplanets from their impact on the associated stars. This [presumably] comes from the recent book Cosmos: The Infographics Book of Space [a side comment: new books seem to provide material for many articles in Significance these days!] and the above graph is also from the book, not the ultimate infographic representation in my opinion given that a simple superposition of lines could do as well. Or better.

¨A common approach to ruling out these sorts of false positives involves running sophisticated numerical algorithms, called Monte Carlo simulations, to explore a wide range of blend scenarios (…) A new planet discovery needs to have a confidence of (…) a one in a million chance that the result is in error.”

The above sentence is obviously of interest, first because the detection of false positives by Monte Carlo hints at a rough version of ABC to assess the likelihood of the observed phenomenon under the null [no detail provided] and second because the probability statement in the end is quite unclear as of its foundations… Reminding me of the Higgs boson controversy. The very last sentence of the article is however brilliant, albeit maybe unintentionaly so:

“To date, 1900 confirmed discoveries have been made. We have certainly come a long way from 1989.”

Yes, 89 down, strictly speaking!

## the latest Significance: Astrostats, black swans, and pregnant drivers [and zombies]

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on February 4, 2015 by xi'an

Reading Significance is always an enjoyable moment, when I can find time to skim through the articles (before my wife gets hold of it!). This time, I lost my copy between my office and home, and borrowed it from Tom Nichols at Warwick with four mornings to read it during breakfast. This December issue is definitely interesting, as it contains several introduction articles on astro- and cosmo-statistics! One thing I had not noticed before is how a large fraction of the papers is written by authors of books, giving a quick entry or interview about their book. For instance, I found out that Roberto Trotta had written a general public book called the Edge of the Sky (All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is) which exposes the fundamentals of cosmology through the 1000 most common words in the English Language.. So Universe is replaced with All-There-Is! I can understand and to some extent applaud the intention, but it nonetheless makes for a painful read, judging from the excerpt, when researcher and telescope are not part of the accepted vocabulary. Reading the corresponding article in Significance let me a bit bemused at the reason provided for the existence of a multiverse, i.e., of multiple replicas of our universe, all with different conditions: multiplying the universes makes our more likely, while it sounds almost impossible on its own! This sounds like a very frequentist argument… and I am not even certain it would convince a frequentist. The other articles in this special astrostatistics section were of a more statistical nature, from estimating the number of galaxies to the chances of a big asteroid impact. Even though I found the graphical representation of the meteorite impacts in the past century because of the impact drawing in the background. However, when I checked the link to Carlo Zapponi’s website, I found the picture was a still of a neat animation of meteorites falling since the first report.

## Price’s theorem?

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , on March 16, 2013 by xi'an

A very interesting article by Martyn Hooper in Significance Feb. 2013 issue I just received. (It is available on-line for free.) It raises the question as to how much exactly Price contributed to the famous Essay… Given the percentage of the Essay that can be attributed to Price with certainty (Bayes’ part stops at page 14 out of 32 pages), given the lack of the original manuscript by Bayes, given the delay between the composition of this original manuscript (1755?), its delivery to Price (1761?) and its publication in 1763, given the absence of any other document published by Bayes on the topic, I tend to concur with Martyn Hooper (and Sharon McGrayne) that Price contributed quite significantly to the 1763 paper. Of course, it would sound quite bizarre to start calling our approach to Statistics Pricean or Pricey (or even Priceless!) Statistics, but this may constitute one of the most striking examples of Stigler’s Law of Eponymy!

## Statistics may be harmful to your freedom

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , on January 29, 2013 by xi'an

On Wednesday, I was reading the freshly delivered Significance and esp. the several papers therein about statisticians being indicted, fired, or otherwise sued for doing statistics. I mentioned a while ago the possible interpretations of L’Aquila verdict (where I do not know whether any of the six scientists is a statistician), but did not know about Graciela Bevacqua‘s hardship in the Argentinian National Statistics Institute, nor about David Nutt being sacked from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, nor about Peter Wilmshurst being sued by NMT (a US medical device corporation) for expressing concern about a clinical trial they conducted. What is most frightening in those stories is that those persons ended up facing those hardships without any support from their respective institutions (quite the opposite in two cases!). And then, on the way home, I further read that the former head of the Greek National Statistics Institute (Elstat) was fired and indicted for over-estimating the Greek deficit, after resisting official pressure to lower it down…  Tough job!

## when the Earth was flat

Posted in Books with tags , , , , on January 22, 2013 by xi'an

I received yet another popular science book to review (for Significance), When the Earth was flat by Graeme Donald. The subtitle is “All the bits of Science we got wrong”, which is both very ambitious (“All”, really?!) and modest (in that most scientific theories are approximations waiting to be invalidated and improved by the next theory). (I wrote this review during my trip in Gainesville, maybe too quickly!)

The themes processed and debunked in this book are wide-ranging. In fact they do not necessarily fall under my definition of science. They often are related to commercial swindles and political agendas loosely based on plainly wrong scientific theories. The book is thus more about the uses of (poor) science than about Science itself. Continue reading

## new significance (out)

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , on July 8, 2012 by xi'an

I have just received the latest issue of significance (June 2012) and there are plenty of interesting articles in it (with no horror story as in the latest issue!). From the cover story about finding emperor penguin colonies on satellite images via guano stains (large scale!, with a terrific and terrifying extract from Mawson’s journal) to “moral maps” à la Quételet, to teaching statistics as seen by the young statisticians section (of the RSS), to Tony O’Hagan favourite formul

$var(X) = E[var(X|Y)]+var(E[X|Y])$

(where he curiously fails to mention Pythagoras, which is how I justify the formula to my students), to the inappropriateness of using hand X-rays to determine whether Indonesian smugglers are under age or not. The less convincing section is obviously the “controversy” one, where the authors make a mechanistic proposal to bypass the drawbacks of p-values and Type I error, without contemplating the ultimate uses of tests…. Very pleasant read (I could have kept for the looong flight to Australia…)

## gender-neutral Olympics?!

Posted in Mountains, Running, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 16, 2012 by xi'an

As usual, reading the latest issue of Significance is quite pleasant and rewarding (although as usual I have to compete with my wife to get hold of the magazine!). This current issue is dedicated to the (London) Olympics. With articles on predictions of future records, on whether or not the 1988 records can be beaten (the Seoul Olympics were the last games before more severe anti-drug tests were introduced), on advices to Usain Bolt for running faster (!) and on the objective dangers of dying from running a marathon (answer: it is much more “dangerous” to train!).

However, a most puzzling (and least statistical) article is Stephanie Kovalchik’s proposal for a gender-neutral Olympics.  The author’s theme is that, in most sports (the exceptions being shooting, yachting, and horse riding, where competitions are mixed), raw performances of women are below those of men for physical and physiological reasons. Stephanie Kovalchik thus “question[s] whether a sex-stratified Olympics is the product of groundless stereotypes about male athletic superiority or could be justified by gender differences at the elite level of sport” (p.20). Unsurprisingly, she concludes that no amount of training seems capable to bring both sexes at the same level: indeed, for instance, Paula Radcliffe, the fastest female marathon runner (2:15:24), is still 11 minutes beyond Patrick Makau, the fastest male marathon runner (2:03:38). They are both super-terrific athletes, the top ones in their categories. Now, Paula runs half-marathon and marathon faster than the best male runners in my team (Insee Paris Club). Where’s the problem?! And why should we try to rank Paula against Patrick?!

A parenthesis: the author mentions a most bizarre (but eventually inappropriate) exception: in the Badwater Ultramarathon, a crazy race covering 135 miles and going from Badwater, Death Valley, at 280’ (85m) below sea level, to the Mt. Whitney Portals at nearly 8,300’ (2530m), with a total of 13,000’ (3962m) of cumulative vertical ascent, four women won over the 25 occurrences of the race. I found this phenomenon quite curious and went to check first the records of the comparable ultra-trail du Mont Blanc, another even crazier race (168km, 9,600 metres of positive height gain, at mostly higher altitudes, between 1000m and 2500m), and saw that last year the first woman in the race was 13th in total, with a difference of four and a half hours with the winner (20:36 hours, believe it or not..!). Going back to the Badwater Ultramarathon, checking the results showed that the race actually attracts a very limited number of runners, from 17 finishers the first year to 83 last year (where the first woman was 7th, about 5 hours from the winner), with a huge variation between runners and between years. So I would not draw so much of a conclusion from this example, certainly not that “in an event where sheer dogged endurance, guts and determination must count for almost everything, we may be there already”. It is rather a law of small numbers: such extreme events attract a very small number of participants with incredibly variable finishing times, e.g. two of the four winning women won out of…5 (1988) and 2 (1989) finishers, while the two other victories were achieved by Pamela Reed over 45 (2003) and 57 (2002) competitors, a much more remarkable feat. Meaning that one or two runners missing or giving up brings a huge change in the final time. The ultra-trail du Mont Blanc now involves a thousand runners and there, numbers count. End of the parenthesis (with total respect to all those runners, I wish I could do it!).

Going back to the paper proposal, Stephanie Kovalchik considers that “credit merit apart from hereditary luck will favour individuals who possess the best genes for sport. Thus, prejudice – in the true sense of pre-judging – at the Olympics runs deeper than gender lines. Geneticism more than sexism is to blame for making the possession of a Y chromosome an advantage at the Games” (p.21). She suggests to instead rank athletes by a “statistical adjustment [that would]  remove the confounding factor of genetic inheritance, to provide a standard of achievement that all could aim at, no matter what their hereditary luck” (p.22). In essence, the winner would be the one that had gained the most compared with a “demographically matched sample of untrained individuals” (p.24). If I may, this sounds perfectly ridiculous! First, the whole point of the Games and of any sporting competition is to determine the “best” athlete. This is not an egalitarian goal and can and does lead to poor outcomes such as cheating, drug enhanced performances, nationalistic recuperations, commercialisation, bribery, and so on. It is thus perfectly coherent to be against those competitions. (I am not a big fan of the Olympics myself for this reason. However, without competition, even at my very humble level, and with little hope of winning anything, I would certainly train much less than I currently do.) But to try to reward efforts to counteract physical differences sounds like political correctness pushed to the extreme!  Second, and this is why I find the paper so a-statistical!, the adjustment must be with respect to a reference population. If we carry the argument to its limit, the only relevant population is made of the athlete him/herself. Indeed, genetic, sociological, cultural, geographical, financial, you-name-it, elements should all be taken into account! Which obviously makes the computation just impossible because then everyone is competing against him/herself.