“Slamming the Sham: A Bayesian Model for Adaptive Adjustment with Noisy Control Data,” Andrew Gelman, Columbia University

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Abstract: It is not always clear how to adjust for control data in causal inference, balancing the goals of reducing bias and variance. In a setting with repeated experiments, Bayesian hierarchical modeling yields an adaptive procedure that uses the data to determine how much adjustment to perform. We demonstrate this procedure on the example that motivated this work, a much-cited series of experiments on the effects of low-frequency magnetic fields on chick brains, as well as on a series of simulated data sets. We also discuss the relevance of this work to causal inference and statistical design and analysis more generally.

Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis (with John Carlin, Hal Stern, David Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Don Rubin), Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deb Nolan), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (with Jennifer Hill), Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (with David Park, Boris Shor, and Jeronimo Cortina), and A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences (co-edited with Jeronimo Cortina).
Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City, the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that your vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in your basement; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.

This workshop series is sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.