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    <title>Pinboard (cshalizi)</title>
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    <description>recent bookmarks from cshalizi</description>
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  </channel><item rdf:about="https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921675/vector-media/">
    <title>Vector Media</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-10T10:58:15+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921675/vector-media/</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Neural networks are designed to dissolve all media into the vector space—a universal space of commensurability. In Vector Media, Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert parse theories of automatic vision to trace contemporary artificial intelligence’s technical ideology of epistemic reduction, where sensory data is turned into abstracted forms of meaning. Under this regime, bias is not just a question of what is represented but of the logic of representation itself. Drawing on Phil Agre’s notion of a critical technical practice, Vector Media reveals how artificial intelligence systems embed new epistemologies of media beneath the surface of their architectures.
"Analyzing the techniques underpinning large multimodal artificial intelligence models like DALL-E, Midjourney, Flux, or Stable Diffusion, Impett and Offert offer the concept of neural exchange value: the value cultural artifacts acquire not through meaning or context but through their capacity to function as vectors. In such a system, commensurability becomes a condition of existence: what matters is not what something is but that it can be embedded. Rather than focusing solely on datasets, Vector Media proposes a critical study of vector spaces—and the machine cultures they produce—as a necessary complement to prevailing approaches in AI critique."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB books:noted neural_networks large_language_models_(so_called) generative_diffusion_models heard_the_talk color_me_skeptical</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:7ba58da0e6ae/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:books:noted"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:neural_networks"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:generative_diffusion_models"/>
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<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0102181">
    <title>[cond-mat/0102181] Regularities Unseen, Randomness Observed: Levels of Entropy Convergence</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-02T18:38:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0102181</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We study how the Shannon entropy of sequences produced by an information source converges to the source's entropy rate. We synthesize several phenomenological approaches to applying information theoretic measures of randomness and memory to stochastic and deterministic processes by using successive derivatives of the Shannon entropy growth curve. This leads, in turn, to natural measures of apparent memory stored in a source and the amounts of information that must be extracted from observations of a source in order for it to be optimally predicted and for an observer to synchronize to it. One consequence of ignoring these structural properties is that the missed regularities are converted to apparent randomness. We demonstrate that this problem arises particularly for small data sets; e.g., in settings where one has access only to short measurement sequences."]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB information_theory computational_mechanics prediction have_read heard_the_talk heard_the_talk_a_quarter_century_ago_in_fact kith_and_kin crutchfield.james_p. feldman.david_p. probability</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:90869a348890/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/hash/d02ff1aeaa5c268dc34790dd1ad21526-Abstract-Conference.html">
    <title>Large language model validity via enhanced conformal prediction methods</title>
    <dc:date>2025-04-23T14:47:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/hash/d02ff1aeaa5c268dc34790dd1ad21526-Abstract-Conference.html</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We develop new conformal inference methods for obtaining validity guarantees on the output of large language models (LLMs). Prior work in conformal language modeling identifies a subset of the text that satisfies a high-probability guarantee of correctness. These methods work by filtering claims from the LLM's original response if a scoring function evaluated on the claim fails to exceed a threshold calibrated via split conformal prediction. Existing methods in this area suffer from two deficiencies. First, the guarantee stated is not conditionally valid. The trustworthiness of the filtering step may vary based on the topic of the response. Second, because the scoring function is imperfect, the filtering step can remove many valuable and accurate claims. We address both of these challenges via two new conformal methods. First, we generalize the conditional conformal procedure of Gibbs et al. (2023) in order to adaptively issue weaker guarantees when they are required to preserve the utility of the output. Second, we show how to systematically improve the quality of the scoring function via a novel algorithm for differentiating through the conditional conformal procedure. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on biography and medical question-answering datasets."

--- To be somewhat unfair: "start with a scoring function that reliably discriminates between confabulations and truth" is very much an "assume a can opener" approach to the problem!  (I said I was being unfair.)]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB conformal_prediction large_language_models_(so_called) heard_the_talk cherian.john to_teach:statistics_and_generative_ai candes.emmanuel_j.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj5957">
    <title>How do we know how smart AI systems are? | Science</title>
    <dc:date>2025-03-17T00:34:41+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj5957</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><dc:subject>mitchell.melanie artificial_intelligence large_language_models_(so_called) embers_of_autoregression have_read kith_and_kin heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:ca2836374b16/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14215">
    <title>[2411.14215] Evaluating the Robustness of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models</title>
    <dc:date>2024-12-09T21:33:51+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14215</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["LLMs have performed well on several reasoning benchmarks, including ones that test analogical reasoning abilities. However, there is debate on the extent to which they are performing general abstract reasoning versus employing non-robust processes, e.g., that overly rely on similarity to pre-training data. Here we investigate the robustness of analogy-making abilities previously claimed for LLMs on three of four domains studied by Webb, Holyoak, and Lu (2023): letter-string analogies, digit matrices, and story analogies. For each domain we test humans and GPT models on robustness to variants of the original analogy problems that test the same abstract reasoning abilities but are likely dissimilar from tasks in the pre-training data. The performance of a system that uses robust abstract reasoning should not decline substantially on these variants.
"On simple letter-string analogies, we find that while the performance of humans remains high for two types of variants we tested, the GPT models' performance declines sharply. This pattern is less pronounced as the complexity of these problems is increased, as both humans and GPT models perform poorly on both the original and variant problems requiring more complex analogies. On digit-matrix problems, we find a similar pattern but only on one out of the two types of variants we tested. On story-based analogy problems, we find that, unlike humans, the performance of GPT models are susceptible to answer-order effects, and that GPT models also may be more sensitive than humans to paraphrasing.
"This work provides evidence that LLMs often lack the robustness of zero-shot human analogy-making, exhibiting brittleness on most of the variations we tested. More generally, this work points to the importance of carefully evaluating AI systems not only for accuracy but also robustness when testing their cognitive capabilities."

--- Post peer-review: [https://openreview.net/forum?id=t5cy5v9wph]]]></description>
<dc:subject>heard_the_talk analogy large_language_models_(so_called) mitchell.melanie kith_and_kin embers_of_autoregression in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:f6e22b45f064/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15680">
    <title>[2205.15680] Simulator-Based Inference with Waldo: Confidence Regions by Leveraging Prediction Algorithms and Posterior Estimators for Inverse Problems</title>
    <dc:date>2024-08-21T17:34:47+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15680</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Prediction algorithms, such as deep neural networks (DNNs), are used in many domain sciences to directly estimate internal parameters of interest in simulator-based models, especially in settings where the observations include images or complex high-dimensional data. In parallel, modern neural density estimators, such as normalizing flows, are becoming increasingly popular for uncertainty quantification, especially when both parameters and observations are high-dimensional. However, parameter inference is an inverse problem and not a prediction task; thus, an open challenge is to construct conditionally valid and precise confidence regions, with a guaranteed probability of covering the true parameters of the data-generating process, no matter what the (unknown) parameter values are, and without relying on large-sample theory. Many simulator-based inference (SBI) methods are indeed known to produce biased or overly confident parameter regions, yielding misleading uncertainty estimates. This paper presents WALDO, a novel method to construct confidence regions with finite-sample conditional validity by leveraging prediction algorithms or posterior estimators that are currently widely adopted in SBI. WALDO reframes the well-known Wald test statistic, and uses a computationally efficient regression-based machinery for classical Neyman inversion of hypothesis tests. We apply our method to a recent high-energy physics problem, where prediction with DNNs has previously led to estimates with prediction bias. We also illustrate how our approach can correct overly confident posterior regions computed with normalizing flows."]]></description>
<dc:subject>confidence_sets simulation-based_inference heard_the_talk kith_and_kin in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:f7483a54c021/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:confidence_sets"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:simulation-based_inference"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06421">
    <title>[2206.06421] Repro Samples Method for Finite- and Large-Sample Inferences</title>
    <dc:date>2023-10-04T17:51:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06421</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This article presents a novel, general, and effective simulation-inspired approach, called {\it repro samples method}, to conduct statistical inference. The approach studies the performance of artificial samples, referred to as {\it repro samples}, obtained by mimicking the true observed sample to achieve uncertainty quantification and construct confidence sets for parameters of interest with guaranteed coverage rates. Both exact and asymptotic inferences are developed. An attractive feature of the general framework developed is that it does not rely on the large sample central limit theorem and is likelihood-free. As such, it is thus effective for complicated inference problems which we can not solve using the large sample central limit theorem. The proposed method is applicable to a wide range of problems, including many open questions where solutions were previously unavailable, for example, those involving discrete or non-numerical parameters. To reduce the large computational cost of such inference problems, we develop a unique matching scheme to obtain a data-driven candidate set. Moreover, we show the advantages of the proposed framework over the classical Neyman-Pearson framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on various models throughout the paper and provide a case study that addresses an open inference question on how to quantify the uncertainty for the unknown number of components in a normal mixture model. To evaluate the empirical performance of our repro samples method, we conduct simulations and study real data examples with comparisons to existing approaches. Although the development pertains to the settings where the large sample central limit theorem does not apply, it also has direct extensions to the cases where the central limit theorem does hold."

--- Based on the talk on Monday, I don't see how this _isn't_ just the Neyman inversion method, with a very clever idea about how to do the testing that I need to wrap my head around.  But it seems very cool, and to be, potentially, very useful to me.  So this needs careful attention.

--- ETA after reading carefully: It's Neyman inversion.  Also, they're not actually getting valid confidence intervals for the number of mixture components, because there's no way to give an upper confidence limit for the number of mixture components.  (For any distribution which really does have k components, there are others with arbitrarily many more clusters, arbitrarily close in distribution.)  They _think_ they can do this because they arbitrarily limit how many clusters they consider.
Now, in the talk Xie gave a rather more convincing example of a confidence set for a discrete parameter, viz., which node on a network some process started spreading from.  The difference, I think, is that in this 2nd case, we can't switch the value of the discrete parameter while making an _arbitrarily small_, and hence undetectably small, change to the distribution.]]></description>
<dc:subject>heard_the_talk confidence_sets simulation-based_inference statistics re:codename:catherine_wheel in_NB have_read</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:72263b788043/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:simulation-based_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:codename:catherine_wheel"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10717">
    <title>[2102.10717] Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial Intelligence</title>
    <dc:date>2023-06-29T15:38:15+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10717</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Conceptual abstraction and analogy-making are key abilities underlying humans' abilities to learn, reason, and robustly adapt their knowledge to new domains. Despite of a long history of research on constructing AI systems with these abilities, no current AI system is anywhere close to a capability of forming humanlike abstractions or analogies. This paper reviews the advantages and limitations of several approaches toward this goal, including symbolic methods, deep learning, and probabilistic program induction. The paper concludes with several proposals for designing challenge tasks and evaluation measures in order to make quantifiable and generalizable progress in this area."]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB analogy artificial_intelligence kith_and_kin mitchell.melanie heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:77d900ff481c/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:analogy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:artificial_intelligence"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:mitchell.melanie"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-03738-6_7">
    <title>Communication Norms and the Collective Cognitive Performance of “Invisible Colleges” | SpringerLink</title>
    <dc:date>2023-05-10T02:44:02+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-03738-6_7</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Scientific research communities may be studied as social networks within which ideas or statements circulate, acquire validity as reliable knowledge, and are recombined to generate further new ideas. Social networks also form the locus for the transmission of tacit knowledge and skills requisite to the interpretation and operationalization of scientific statements. These extensive, yet informal structures of inter-personal knowledge-transactions have been referred to as constituting “invisible colleges”. This paper develops an abstract and highly stylized account of the communications structure of an invisible college, and examines its collective epistemological performance by employing concepts and results from Markov random field theory."

--- Now does this version (from 1996?) differ from the reprint I still have from the 1998 SFI conference?]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB collective_cognition sociology_of_science david.paul_a. science_as_a_social_process random_fields voter_model heard_the_talk cleaning_out_the_filing_cabinet_for_the_first_time_since_2005</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:f2dd9bd2f1fb/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:collective_cognition"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:sociology_of_science"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:david.paul_a."/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:science_as_a_social_process"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:random_fields"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:voter_model"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:cleaning_out_the_filing_cabinet_for_the_first_time_since_2005"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/421508">
    <title>Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences1 | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 110, No 4</title>
    <dc:date>2022-04-13T12:35:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/421508</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["A recursive analysis of network and institutional evolution is offered to account for the decentralized structure of the commercial field of the life sciences. Four alternative logics of attachment—accumulative advantage, homophily, follow‐the‐trend, and multiconnectivity—are tested to explain the structure and dynamics of interorganizational collaboration in biotechnology. Using multiple novel methods, the authors demonstrate how different rules for affiliation shape network evolution. Commercialization strategies pursued by early corporate entrants are supplanted by universities, research institutes, venture capital, and small firms. As organizations increase their collaborative activities and diversify their ties to others, cohesive subnetworks form, characterized by multiple, independent pathways. These structural components, in turn, condition the choices and opportunities available to members of a field, thereby reinforcing an attachment logic based on differential connections to diverse partners."]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB sociology social_networks network_formation white.douglas_r. kith_and_kin heard_the_talk have_read to_teach:baby-nets</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:b4de8caddc75/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:sociology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:social_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_formation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:white.douglas_r."/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:baby-nets"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/2/40">
    <title>Philosophies | Free Full-Text | On Falsifiable Statistical Hypotheses</title>
    <dc:date>2022-04-13T02:27:19+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/2/40</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Popper argued that a statistical falsification required a prior methodological decision to regard sufficiently improbable events as ruled out. That suggestion has generated a number of fruitful approaches, but also a number of apparent paradoxes and ultimately, no clear consensus. It is still commonly claimed that, since random samples are logically consistent with all the statistical hypotheses on the table, falsification simply does not apply in realistic statistical settings. We claim that the situation is considerably improved if we ask a conceptually prior question: when should a statistical hypothesis be regarded as falsifiable. To that end we propose several different notions of statistical falsifiability and prove that, whichever definition we prefer, the same hypotheses turn out to be falsifiable. That shows that statistical falsifiability enjoys a kind of conceptual robustness. These notions of statistical falsifiability are arrived at by proposing statistical analogues to intuitive properties enjoyed by exemplary falsifiable hypotheses familiar from classical philosophy of science. That demonstrates that, to a large extent, this philosophical tradition was on the right conceptual track. Finally, we demonstrate that, under weak assumptions, the statistically falsifiable hypotheses correspond precisely to the closed sets in a standard topology on probability measures. That means that standard techniques from statistics and measure theory can be used to determine exactly which hypotheses are statistically falsifiable. In other words: the proposed notion of statistical falsifiability both answers to our conceptual demands and submits to standard mathematical techniques."

--- Curious to see how much this has evolved since KG's thesis defense.]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB philosophy_of_science falsifiability probability statistics foundations_of_statistics genin.konstantin heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:ad26e3ac86f0/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:philosophy_of_science"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:falsifiability"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:probability"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:foundations_of_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:genin.konstantin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02950-3">
    <title>The computational philosophy: simulation as a core philosophical method | SpringerLink</title>
    <dc:date>2022-02-14T13:33:09+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02950-3</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Modeling and computer simulations, we claim, should be considered core philosophical methods. More precisely, we will defend two theses. First, philosophers should use simulations for many of the same reasons we currently use thought experiments. In fact, simulations are superior to thought experiments in achieving some philosophical goals. Second, devising and coding computational models instill good philosophical habits of mind. Throughout the paper, we respond to the often implicit objection that computer modeling is “not philosophical.”"
]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB simulation philosophy mayo-wilson.conor zollman.kevin heard_the_talk via:rvenkat</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:55e5def7b4d2/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:simulation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:mayo-wilson.conor"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:zollman.kevin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:via:rvenkat"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00248">
    <title>[2107.00248] Randomization-only Inference in Experiments with Interference</title>
    <dc:date>2021-10-25T20:04:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00248</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In experiments that study social phenomena, such as peer influence or herd immunity, the treatment of one unit may influence the outcomes of others. Such "interference between units" violates traditional approaches for causal inference, so that additional assumptions are required to model the underlying social mechanism. We propose an approach that requires no such assumptions, allowing for interference that is both unmodeled and strong, with confidence intervals found using only the randomization of treatment. Additionally, the approach allows for the usage of regression, matching, or weighting, as may best fit the application at hand. Inference is done by bounding the distribution of the estimation error over all possible values of the unknown counterfactual, using an integer program. Examples are shown using a vaccine trial and two experiments investigating social influence."

--- I enjoyed hearing David talk about this, but I continue to feel like there's something fundamental I'm not getting here.]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB have_skimmed heard_the_talk experimental_design experiments_on_networks network_data_analysis statistics kith_and_kin to_read choi.david_s.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:4d7e366be396/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_skimmed"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:experimental_design"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:experiments_on_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:choi.david_s."/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sta4.426">
    <title>Consistent Estimation of Number of Communities in Stochastic Block Models using Cross‐Validation - Qin - - Stat - Wiley Online Library</title>
    <dc:date>2021-10-11T19:50:46+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sta4.426</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Stochastic block model (SBM) and its variants constitute an important family of probabilistic tools for studying network data. There is a rich literature on methods for estimating the block labels and model parameters of stochastic block models. Most of these studies would require the number of communities $K$ as an input, making the estimation of K an important problem. Cross-validation is a natural option for this problem since it is a widely used generic method for evaluating model fitting. However, cross-validation is known to be inconsistent and prone to over-fitting unless impractical split ratios are used. Cross-validation with confidence (CVC) is proposed with better theoretical guarantees in conventional settings. We study the properties of CVC for stochastic block models. Our theoretical studies show that CVC, unlike the standard cross-validation, can consistently pick the optimal K under suitable conditions. We implement this method and check its performance against other established methods on both synthetic and real datasets."

--- Pretty sure I bookmarked the preprint.]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB stochastic_block_models community_discovery cross-validation network_data_analysis kith_and_kin lei.jing heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:23e1965abcdf/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:stochastic_block_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:community_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:cross-validation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:lei.jing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://projecteuclid.org/journals/annals-of-statistics/volume-49/issue-3/Causal-discovery-in-heavy-tailed-models/10.1214/20-AOS2021.short">
    <title>Causal discovery in heavy-tailed models</title>
    <dc:date>2021-08-10T14:07:45+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://projecteuclid.org/journals/annals-of-statistics/volume-49/issue-3/Causal-discovery-in-heavy-tailed-models/10.1214/20-AOS2021.short</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Causal questions are omnipresent in many scientific problems. While much progress has been made in the analysis of causal relationships between random variables, these methods are not well suited if the causal mechanisms only manifest themselves in extremes. This work aims to connect the two fields of causal inference and extreme value theory. We define the causal tail coefficient that captures asymmetries in the extremal dependence of two random variables. In the population case, the causal tail coefficient is shown to reveal the causal structure if the distribution follows a linear structural causal model. This holds even in the presence of latent common causes that have the same tail index as the observed variables. Based on a consistent estimator of the causal tail coefficient, we propose a computationally highly efficient algorithm that estimates the causal structure. We prove that our method consistently recovers the causal order and we compare it to other well-established and nonextremal approaches in causal discovery on synthetic and real data. The code is available as an open-access R package."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk heavy_tails causal_inference causal_discovery statistics</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:2b38a05b49f0/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heavy_tails"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.06138">
    <title>[2006.06138] Conformal Inference of Counterfactuals and Individual Treatment Effects</title>
    <dc:date>2021-05-13T05:25:32+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.06138</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Evaluating treatment effect heterogeneity widely informs treatment decision making. At the moment, much emphasis is placed on the estimation of the conditional average treatment effect via flexible machine learning algorithms. While these methods enjoy some theoretical appeal in terms of consistency and convergence rates, they generally perform poorly in terms of uncertainty quantification. This is troubling since assessing risk is crucial for reliable decision-making in sensitive and uncertain environments. In this work, we propose a conformal inference-based approach that can produce reliable interval estimates for counterfactuals and individual treatment effects under the potential outcome framework. For completely randomized or stratified randomized experiments with perfect compliance, the intervals have guaranteed average coverage in finite samples regardless of the unknown data generating mechanism. For randomized experiments with ignorable compliance and general observational studies obeying the strong ignorability assumption, the intervals satisfy a doubly robust property which states the following: the average coverage is approximately controlled if either the propensity score or the conditional quantiles of potential outcomes can be estimated accurately. Numerical studies on both synthetic and real datasets empirically demonstrate that existing methods suffer from a significant coverage deficit even in simple models. In contrast, our methods achieve the desired coverage with reasonably short intervals."]]></description>
<dc:subject>causal_inference confidence_sets conformal_prediction in_NB heard_the_talk candes.emmanuel_j.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:90982831f385/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:confidence_sets"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:conformal_prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:candes.emmanuel_j."/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12871">
    <title>[2104.12871] Why AI is Harder Than We Think</title>
    <dc:date>2021-04-29T15:02:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12871</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment ("AI spring") and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding ("AI winter"). Even with today's seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational companions has turned out to be much harder than many people expected. One reason for these repeating cycles is our limited understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself. In this paper I describe four fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field. I conclude by discussing the open questions spurred by these fallacies, including the age-old challenge of imbuing machines with humanlike common sense."]]></description>
<dc:subject>have_read heard_the_talk artificial_intelligence kith_and_kin mitchell.melanie in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:9e2c3fff728b/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:artificial_intelligence"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:mitchell.melanie"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14497">
    <title>[2004.14497] Optimal doubly robust estimation of heterogeneous causal effects</title>
    <dc:date>2021-04-21T19:44:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14497</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Heterogeneous effect estimation plays a crucial role in causal inference, with applications across medicine and social science. Many methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) have been proposed in recent years, but there are important theoretical gaps in understanding if and when such methods are optimal. This is especially true when the CATE has nontrivial structure (e.g., smoothness or sparsity). Our work contributes in several main ways. First, we study a two-stage doubly robust CATE estimator and give a generic model-free error bound, which, despite its generality, yields sharper results than those in the current literature. We apply the bound to derive error rates in nonparametric models with smoothness or sparsity, and give sufficient conditions for oracle efficiency. Underlying our error bound is a general oracle inequality for regression with estimated or imputed outcomes, which is of independent interest; this is the second main contribution. The third contribution is aimed at understanding the fundamental statistical limits of CATE estimation. To that end, we propose and study a local polynomial adaptation of double-residual regression. We show that this estimator can be oracle efficient under even weaker conditions, if used with a specialized form of sample splitting and careful choices of tuning parameters. These are the weakest conditions currently found in the literature, and we conjecture that they are minimal in a minimax sense. We go on to give error bounds in the non-trivial regime where oracle rates cannot be achieved. Some finite-sample properties are explored with simulations."]]></description>
<dc:subject>causal_inference nonparametrics heard_the_talk have_read in_NB kennedy.edward_h.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:e1f9f232f51d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:nonparametrics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kennedy.edward_h."/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://philpapers.org/rec/MAYTIT">
    <title>Conor Mayo-Wilson, Kevin J. S. Zollman &amp; David Danks, The Independence Thesis: When Individual and Social Epistemology Diverge - PhilPapers</title>
    <dc:date>2021-04-16T15:03:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://philpapers.org/rec/MAYTIT</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In the latter half of the twentieth century, philosophers of science have argued (implicitly and explicitly) that epistemically rational individuals might compose epistemically irrational groups and that, conversely, epistemically rational groups might be composed of epistemically irrational individuals. We call the conjunction of these two claims the Independence Thesis, as they together imply that methodological prescriptions for scientific communities and those for individual scientists might be logically independent of one another. We develop a formal model of scientific inquiry, define four criteria for individual and group epistemic rationality, and then prove that the four definitions diverge, in the sense that individuals will be judged rational when groups are not and vice versa. We conclude by explaining implications of the inconsistency thesis for (i) descriptive history and sociology of science and (ii) normative prescriptions for scientific communities."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk collective_cognition philosophy_of_science rationality mayo-wilson.conor danks.david kith_and_kin zollman.kevin_j._s.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:7d1aed47a5fe/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:collective_cognition"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:philosophy_of_science"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:rationality"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:mayo-wilson.conor"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:danks.david"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:zollman.kevin_j._s."/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.nber.org/papers/w23673">
    <title>Opportunities and Challenges: Lessons from Analyzing Terabytes of Scanner Data | NBER</title>
    <dc:date>2021-04-11T03:31:25+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.nber.org/papers/w23673</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This paper seeks to better understand what makes big data analysis different, what we can and cannot do with existing econometric tools, and what issues need to be dealt with in order to work with the data efficiently. As a case study, I set out to extract any business cycle information that might exist in four terabytes of weekly scanner data. The main challenge is to handle the volume, variety, and characteristics of the data within the constraints of our computing environment. Scalable and efficient algorithms are available to ease the computation burden, but they often have unknown statistical properties and are not designed for the purpose of efficient estimation or optimal inference. As well, economic data have unique characteristics that generic algorithms may not accommodate. There is a need for computationally efficient econometric methods as big data is likely here to stay."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB data_mining macroeconomics ng.serena heard_the_talk to_read re:your_favorite_dsge_sucks</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:59ca1ea7aed8/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:data_mining"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:macroeconomics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:ng.serena"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:your_favorite_dsge_sucks"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aos/1611889233">
    <title>Kim , Ramdas , Singh , Wasserman : Classification accuracy as a proxy for two-sample testing</title>
    <dc:date>2021-02-04T15:31:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aos/1611889233</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["When data analysts train a classifier and check if its accuracy is significantly different from chance, they are implicitly performing a two-sample test. We investigate the statistical properties of this flexible approach in the high-dimensional setting. We prove two results that hold for all classifiers in any dimensions: if its true error remains ϵϵ-better than chance for some ϵ>0ϵ>0 as d,n→∞d,n→∞, then (a) the permutation-based test is consistent (has power approaching to one), (b) a computationally efficient test based on a Gaussian approximation of the null distribution is also consistent. To get a finer understanding of the rates of consistency, we study a specialized setting of distinguishing Gaussians with mean-difference δδ and common (known or unknown) covariance ΣΣ, when d/n→c∈(0,∞)d/n→c∈(0,∞). We study variants of Fisher’s linear discriminant analysis (LDA) such as “naive Bayes” in a nontrivial regime when ϵ→0ϵ→0 (the Bayes classifier has true accuracy approaching 1/2), and contrast their power with corresponding variants of Hotelling’s test. Surprisingly, the expressions for their power match exactly in terms of nn, dd, δδ, ΣΣ, and the LDA approach is only worse by a constant factor, achieving an asymptotic relative efficiency (ARE) of 1/π‾‾√1/π for balanced samples. We also extend our results to high-dimensional elliptical distributions with finite kurtosis. Other results of independent interest include minimax lower bounds, and the optimality of Hotelling’s test when d=o(n)d=o(n). Simulation results validate our theory, and we present practical takeaway messages along with natural open problems."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB hypothesis_testing two-sample_tests classifiers high-dimensional_statistics heard_the_talk kith_and_kin singh.aarti wasserman.larry ramdas.aaditya</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:9a8de542290c/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:hypothesis_testing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:two-sample_tests"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:classifiers"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:high-dimensional_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:singh.aarti"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:wasserman.larry"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:ramdas.aaditya"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190692421.001.0001">
    <title>Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World - Oxford Scholarship</title>
    <dc:date>2021-01-16T08:02:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190692421.001.0001</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Injustice offers a radical alternative to familiar ways of thinking about problems of justice and injustice, one motivated by the urgency of concrete struggles over injustice in the real world. It rejects the paradigm of ideal moral theory, which suffers from theoretical paralysis, distortional thinking, and a reflexive tendency to subordinate politics to morality. Instead, this book proposes an innovative approach that integrates realistic analysis of conflict, power, and politics with substantive normative critique and prescription. It does so by developing a bifocal theoretical framework that treats claims about justice and injustice as ideological claims. This framework enables theorists to shift their focus between two complementary perspectives, distinguishing the work of analyzing politics and advocating for particular substantive points of view. The book outlines a substantive democratic account of injustice and uses it to show what practical difference it makes if one adopts the approach it recommends. Injustice describes the work that political theory and political theorists can do to combat injustice and illustrates it through a novel reconceptualization of responsibility for injustice."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB books:noted moral_philosophy political_philosophy heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:0d0ee8ff565a/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:books:noted"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:moral_philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:political_philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-international-astronomical-union/article/potential-of-likelihoodfree-inference-of-cosmological-parameters-with-weak-lensing-data/0E1FEF317A0C09039B52C8791E63670D">
    <title>The potential of likelihood-free inference of cosmological parameters with weak lensing data | Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union | Cambridge Core</title>
    <dc:date>2020-12-13T23:58:29+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-international-astronomical-union/article/potential-of-likelihoodfree-inference-of-cosmological-parameters-with-weak-lensing-data/0E1FEF317A0C09039B52C8791E63670D</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In the statistical framework of likelihood-free inference, the posterior distribution of model parameters is explored via simulation rather than direct evaluation of the likelihood function, permitting inference in situations where this function is analytically intractable. We consider the problem of estimating cosmological parameters using measurements of the weak gravitational lensing of galaxies; specifically, we propose the use a likelihood-free approach to investigate the posterior distribution of some parameters in the ΛCDM model upon observing a large number of sheared galaxies. The choice of summary statistic used when comparing observed data and simulated data in the likelihood-free inference framework is critical, so we work toward a principled method of choosing the summary statistic, aiming for dimension reduction while seeking a statistic that is as close as possible to being sufficient for the parameters of interest."]]></description>
<dc:subject>have_read heard_the_talk approved_the_thesis astronomy approximate_bayesian_computation sufficiency exponential_families dimension_reduction simulation-based_estimation statistics in_NB re:codename:catherine_wheel</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:af0f8495eafc/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:approved_the_thesis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:astronomy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:approximate_bayesian_computation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:sufficiency"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:exponential_families"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:dimension_reduction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:simulation-based_estimation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:codename:catherine_wheel"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10399">
    <title>[2002.10399] Confidence Sets and Hypothesis Testing in a Likelihood-Free Inference Setting</title>
    <dc:date>2020-12-13T23:29:48+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10399</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Parameter estimation, statistical tests and confidence sets are the cornerstones of classical statistics that allow scientists to make inferences about the underlying process that generated the observed data. A key question is whether one can still construct hypothesis tests and confidence sets with proper coverage and high power in a so-called likelihood-free inference (LFI) setting; that is, a setting where the likelihood is not explicitly known but one can forward-simulate observable data according to a stochastic model. In this paper, we present 𝙰𝙲𝙾𝚁𝙴 (Approximate Computation via Odds Ratio Estimation), a frequentist approach to LFI that first formulates the classical likelihood ratio test (LRT) as a parametrized classification problem, and then uses the equivalence of tests and confidence sets to build confidence regions for parameters of interest. We also present a goodness-of-fit procedure for checking whether the constructed tests and confidence regions are valid. 𝙰𝙲𝙾𝚁𝙴 is based on the key observation that the LRT statistic, the rejection probability of the test, and the coverage of the confidence set are conditional distribution functions which often vary smoothly as a function of the parameters of interest. Hence, instead of relying solely on samples simulated at fixed parameter settings (as is the convention in standard Monte Carlo solutions), one can leverage machine learning tools and data simulated in the neighborhood of a parameter to improve estimates of quantities of interest. We demonstrate the efficacy of 𝙰𝙲𝙾𝚁𝙴 with both theoretical and empirical results. Our implementation is available on Github."]]></description>
<dc:subject>have_read heard_the_talk approved_the_thesis_proposal simulation-based_inference lee.ann_b. izbicki.rafael dalmasso.niccolo statistics confidence_sets hypothesis_testing in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:f4683e889416/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:approved_the_thesis_proposal"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:simulation-based_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:lee.ann_b."/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:izbicki.rafael"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:dalmasso.niccolo"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:confidence_sets"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:hypothesis_testing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2020.1833888">
    <title>Hierarchical Community Detection by Recursive Partitioning: Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol 0, No 0</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-25T15:43:25+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2020.1833888</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The problem of community detection in networks is usually formulated as finding a single partition of the network into some “correct” number of communities. We argue that it is more interpretable and in some regimes more accurate to construct a hierarchical tree of communities instead. This can be done with a simple top-down recursive partitioning algorithm, starting with a single community and separating the nodes into two communities by spectral clustering repeatedly, until a stopping rule suggests there are no further communities. This class of algorithms is model-free, computationally efficient, and requires no tuning other than selecting a stopping rule. We show that there are regimes where this approach outperforms K-way spectral clustering, and propose a natural framework for analyzing the algorithm’s theoretical performance, the binary tree stochastic block model. Under this model, we prove that the algorithm correctly recovers the entire community tree under relatively mild assumptions. We apply the algorithm to a gene network based on gene co-occurrence in 1580 research papers on anemia, and identify six clusters of genes in a meaningful hierarchy. We also illustrate the algorithm on a dataset of statistics papers. "]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk community_discovery bickel.peter_j. sarkar.purnamrita levina.elizaveta</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:840444c82d8d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:community_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:bickel.peter_j."/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:sarkar.purnamrita"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:levina.elizaveta"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2020.1782219">
    <title>Network Dependence Can Lead to Spurious Associations and Invalid Inference: Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol 0, No 0</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-20T19:49:26+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2020.1782219</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Researchers across the health and social sciences generally assume that observations are independent, even while relying on convenience samples that draw subjects from one or a small number of communities, schools, hospitals, etc. A paradigmatic example of this is the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). Many of the limitations of such samples are well-known, but the issue of statistical dependence due to social network ties has not previously been addressed. We show that, along with anticonservative variance estimation, this can result in spurious associations due to network dependence. Using a statistical test that we adapted from one developed for spatial autocorrelation, we test for network dependence in several of the thousands of influential papers that have been published using FHS data. Results suggest that some of the many decades of research on coronary heart disease, other health outcomes, and peer influence using FHS data may suffer from spurious associations, error-prone point estimates, and anticonservative inference due to unacknowledged network dependence. These issues are not unique to the FHS; as researchers in psychology, medicine, and beyond grapple with replication failures, this unacknowledged source of invalid statistical inference should be part of the conversation."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB have_read causal_inference network_data_analysis networks kith_and_kin ogburn.elizabeth to_teach:baby-nets re:homophily_and_confounding social_science_methodology heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:64e51a725339/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:ogburn.elizabeth"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:baby-nets"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:homophily_and_confounding"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:social_science_methodology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03395">
    <title>[2011.03395] Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-18T05:38:17+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03395</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["ML models often exhibit unexpectedly poor behavior when they are deployed in real-world domains. We identify underspecification as a key reason for these failures. An ML pipeline is underspecified when it can return many predictors with equivalently strong held-out performance in the training domain. Underspecification is common in modern ML pipelines, such as those based on deep learning. Predictors returned by underspecified pipelines are often treated as equivalent based on their training domain performance, but we show here that such predictors can behave very differently in deployment domains. This ambiguity can lead to instability and poor model behavior in practice, and is a distinct failure mode from previously identified issues arising from structural mismatch between training and deployment domains. We show that this problem appears in a wide variety of practical ML pipelines, using examples from computer vision, medical imaging, natural language processing, clinical risk prediction based on electronic health records, and medical genomics. Our results show the need to explicitly account for underspecification in modeling pipelines that are intended for real-world deployment in any domain."]]></description>
<dc:subject>machine_learning prediction statistics misspecification model_selection to_teach:childs_garden_of_statistical_learning_theory have_read in_NB heard_the_talk damour.alexander</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:18af6bd6c84a/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:machine_learning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:misspecification"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:model_selection"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:childs_garden_of_statistical_learning_theory"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:damour.alexander"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ejs/1576119710">
    <title>Verdinelli , Wasserman : Hybrid Wasserstein distance and fast distribution clustering</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-16T16:12:38+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ejs/1576119710</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We define a modified Wasserstein distance for distribution clustering which inherits many of the properties of the Wasserstein distance but which can be estimated easily and computed quickly. The modified distance is the sum of two terms. The first term — which has a closed form — measures the location-scale differences between the distributions. The second term is an approximation that measures the remaining distance after accounting for location-scale differences. We consider several forms of approximation with our main emphasis being a tangent space approximation that can be estimated using nonparametric regression and leads to fast and easy computation of barycenters which otherwise would be very difficult to compute. We evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this approach on simulated and real examples."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB probability statistics clustering kith_and_kin wasserman.larry verdinelli.isa heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:105837eab23d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:probability"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:clustering"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:wasserman.larry"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:verdinelli.isa"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ejs/1576573369">
    <title>Kim , Lee , Lei : Global and local two-sample tests via regression</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-16T16:11:48+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ejs/1576573369</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Two-sample testing is a fundamental problem in statistics. Despite its long history, there has been renewed interest in this problem with the advent of high-dimensional and complex data. Specifically, in the machine learning literature, there have been recent methodological developments such as classification accuracy tests. The goal of this work is to present a regression approach to comparing multivariate distributions of complex data. Depending on the chosen regression model, our framework can efficiently handle different types of variables and various structures in the data, with competitive power under many practical scenarios. Whereas previous work has been largely limited to global tests which conceal much of the local information, our approach naturally leads to a local two-sample testing framework in which we identify local differences between multivariate distributions with statistical confidence. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach both theoretically and empirically, under some well-known parametric and nonparametric regression methods. Our proposed methods are applied to simulated data as well as a challenging astronomy data set to assess their practical usefulness."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB two-sample_tests nonparametrics high-dimensional_statistics regression kith_and_kin lee.ann_b. lei.jing heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:d95b8656b5cd/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:two-sample_tests"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:nonparametrics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:high-dimensional_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:lee.ann_b."/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:lei.jing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.07570">
    <title>[1607.07570] Random graph models for dynamic networks</title>
    <dc:date>2020-07-15T15:37:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.07570</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We propose generalizations of a number of standard network models, including the classic random graph, the configuration model, and the stochastic block model, to the case of time-varying networks. We assume that the presence and absence of edges are governed by continuous-time Markov processes with rate parameters that can depend on properties of the nodes. In addition to computing equilibrium properties of these models, we demonstrate their use in data analysis and statistical inference, giving efficient algorithms for fitting them to observed network data. This allows us, for instance, to estimate the time constants of network evolution or infer community structure from temporal network data using cues embedded both in the probabilities over time that node pairs are connected by edges and in the characteristic dynamics of edge appearance and disappearance. We illustrate our methods with a selection of applications, both to computer-generated test networks and real-world examples."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk network_data_analysis markov_models kith_and_kin moore.cristopher newman.mark networks_in_and_over_time</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:3e41f2daf2a9/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:markov_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:moore.cristopher"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:newman.mark"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:networks_in_and_over_time"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1">
    <title>A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States | Nature Human Behaviour</title>
    <dc:date>2020-06-14T17:14:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We assessed racial disparities in policing in the United States by compiling and analysing a dataset detailing nearly 100 million traffic stops conducted across the country. We found that black drivers were less likely to be stopped after sunset, when a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one’s race, suggesting bias in stop decisions. Furthermore, by examining the rate at which stopped drivers were searched and the likelihood that searches turned up contraband, we found evidence that the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for searching white drivers. Finally, we found that legalization of recreational marijuana reduced the number of searches of white, black and Hispanic drivers—but the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was still lower than that for white drivers post-legalization. Our results indicate that police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias and point to the value of policy interventions to mitigate these disparities."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk racism police statistics to_teach:statistics_of_inequality_and_discrimination</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:eb8f949614df/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:racism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:police"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:statistics_of_inequality_and_discrimination"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2764488">
    <title>Estimating the Causal Impact of Recommendation Systems from Observational Data</title>
    <dc:date>2019-11-27T17:22:36+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2764488</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Recommendation systems are an increasingly prominent part of the web, accounting for up to a third of all traffic on several of the world's most popular sites. Nevertheless, little is known about how much activity such systems actually cause over and above activity that would have occurred via other means (e.g., search) if recommendations were absent. Although the ideal way to estimate the causal impact of recommendations is via randomized experiments, such experiments are costly and may inconvenience users. In this paper, therefore, we present a method for estimating causal effects from purely observational data. Specifically, we show that causal identification through an instrumental variable is possible when a product experiences an instantaneous shock in direct traffic and the products recommended next to it do not. We then apply our method to browsing logs containing anonymized activity for 2.1 million users on Amazon.com over a 9 month period and analyze over 4,000 unique products that experience such shocks. We find that although recommendation click-throughs do account for a large fraction of traffic among these products, at least 75% of this activity would likely occur in the absence of recommendations. We conclude with a discussion about the assumptions under which the method is appropriate and caveats around extrapolating results to other products, sites, or settings."

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05569]]></description>
<dc:subject>causal_inference recommender_systems watts.duncan hofman.jake to_teach:data-mining heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:284968d0bdaa/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:recommender_systems"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:watts.duncan"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:hofman.jake"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:data-mining"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00535">
    <title>[1911.00535] Think-aloud interviews: A tool for exploring student statistical reasoning</title>
    <dc:date>2019-11-18T21:51:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00535</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["As statistics educators revise introductory courses to cover new topics and reach students from more diverse academic backgrounds, they need assessments to test if new teaching strategies and new curricula are meeting their goals. But assessing student understanding of statistics concepts can be difficult: conceptual questions are difficult to write clearly, and students often interpret questions in unexpected ways and give answers for unexpected reasons. Assessment results alone also do not clearly indicate the reasons students pick specific answers.
"We describe think-aloud interviews with students as a powerful tool to ensure that draft questions fulfill their intended purpose, uncover unexpected misconceptions or surprising readings of questions, and suggest new questions or further pedagogical research. We have conducted more than 40 hour-long think-aloud interviews to develop over 50 assessment questions, and have collected pre- and post-test assessment data from hundreds of introductory statistics students at two institutions.
"Think-alouds and assessment data have helped us refine draft questions and explore student misunderstandings. Our findings include previously under-reported statistical misconceptions about sampling distributions and causation. These results suggest directions for future statistics education research and show how think-aloud interviews can be effectively used to develop assessments and improve our understanding of student learning."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk kith_and_kin statistics cognitive_science education protocol_analysis expertise have_read</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:cc522a226b76/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:cognitive_science"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:education"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:protocol_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:expertise"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09007">
    <title>[1910.09007] Permutation-Based Causal Structure Learning with Unknown Intervention Targets</title>
    <dc:date>2019-10-22T13:15:26+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09007</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We consider the problem of estimating causal DAG models from a mix of observational and interventional data, when the intervention targets are partially or completely unknown. This problem is highly relevant for example in genomics, since gene knockout technologies are known to have off-target effects. We characterize the interventional Markov equivalence class of DAGs that can be identified from interventional data with unknown intervention targets. In addition, we propose a provably consistent algorithm for learning the interventional Markov equivalence class from such data. The proposed algorithm greedily searches over the space of permutations to minimize a novel score function. The algorithm is nonparametric, which is particularly important for applications to genomics, where the relationships between variables are often non-linear and the distribution non-Gaussian. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on synthetic and biological datasets."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB causal_discovery statistics gene_expression_data_analysis uhler.caroline heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:96c3323d9aed/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:gene_expression_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:uhler.caroline"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09014">
    <title>[1910.09014] Ordering-Based Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables</title>
    <dc:date>2019-10-22T13:13:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09014</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We consider the task of learning a causal graph in the presence of latent confounders given i.i.d.~samples from the model. While current algorithms for causal structure discovery in the presence of latent confounders are constraint-based, we here propose a score-based approach. We prove that under assumptions weaker than faithfulness, any sparsest independence map (IMAP) of the distribution belongs to the Markov equivalence class of the true model. This motivates the \emph{Sparsest Poset} formulation - that posets can be mapped to minimal IMAPs of the true model such that the sparsest of these IMAPs is Markov equivalent to the true model. Motivated by this result, we propose a greedy algorithm over the space of posets for causal structure discovery in the presence of latent confounders and compare its performance to the current state-of-the-art algorithms FCI and FCI+ on synthetic data."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB causal_discovery statistics uhler.caroline heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:5be51ca8c588/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:uhler.caroline"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12741">
    <title>[1905.12741] Using Text Embeddings for Causal Inference</title>
    <dc:date>2019-09-30T23:11:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12741</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We address causal inference with text documents. For example, does adding a theorem to a paper affect its chance of acceptance? Does reporting the gender of a forum post author affect the popularity of the post? We estimate these effects from observational data, where they may be confounded by features of the text such as the subject or writing quality. Although the text suffices for causal adjustment, it is prohibitively high-dimensional. The challenge is to find a low-dimensional text representation that can be used in causal inference. A key insight is that causal adjustment requires only the aspects of text that are predictive of both the treatment and outcome. Our proposed method adapts deep language models to learn low-dimensional embeddings from text that predict these values well; these embeddings suffice for causal adjustment. We establish theoretical properties of this method. We study it empirically on semi-simulated and real data on paper acceptance and forum post popularity. Code is available at this https URL."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB text_mining causal_inference blei.david heard_the_talk to_read to_present_in_causal_inference_reading_group</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:068d07ae4ba3/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:text_mining"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:blei.david"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_present_in_causal_inference_reading_group"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00778">
    <title>[1804.00778] High-Dimensional Joint Estimation of Multiple Directed Gaussian Graphical Models</title>
    <dc:date>2019-08-20T15:34:51+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00778</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We consider the problem of jointly estimating multiple related directed acyclic graph (DAG) models based on high-dimensional data from each graph. This problem is motivated by the task of learning gene regulatory networks based on gene expression data from different tissues, developmental stages or disease states. We prove that under certain regularity conditions, the proposed ℓ0-penalized maximum likelihood estimator converges in Frobenius norm to the adjacency matrices consistent with the data-generating distributions and has the correct sparsity. In particular, we show that this joint estimation procedure leads to a faster convergence rate than estimating each DAG model separately. As a corollary, we also obtain high-dimensional consistency results for causal inference from a mix of observational and interventional data. For practical purposes, we propose jointGES consisting of Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) to estimate the union of all DAG models followed by variable selection using lasso to obtain the different DAGs, and we analyze its consistency guarantees. The proposed method is illustrated through an analysis of simulated data as well as epithelial ovarian cancer gene expression data."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB causal_discovery graphical_models statistics uhler.caroline heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:fc4c9373e554/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graphical_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:uhler.caroline"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05097">
    <title>[1908.05097] Causal discovery in heavy-tailed models</title>
    <dc:date>2019-08-15T20:55:04+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05097</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Causal questions are omnipresent in many scientific problems. While much progress has been made in the analysis of causal relationships between random variables, these methods are not well suited if the causal mechanisms manifest themselves only in extremes. This work aims to connect the two fields of causal inference and extreme value theory. We define the causal tail coefficient that captures asymmetries in the extremal dependence of two random variables. In the population case, the causal tail coefficient is shown to reveal the causal structure if the distribution follows a linear structural causal model. This holds even in the presence of latent common causes that have the same tail index as the observed variables. Based on a consistent estimator of the causal tail coefficient, we propose a computationally highly efficient algorithm that infers causal structure from finitely many data. We prove that our method consistently estimates the causal order and compare it to other well-established and non-extremal approaches in causal discovery on synthetic data. The code is available as an open-access R package on Github."]]></description>
<dc:subject>heard_the_talk causal_discovery causal_inference statistics heavy_tails in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:9170ebc3301d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heavy_tails"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.00520">
    <title>[1908.00520] Network Dependence and Confounding by Network Structure Lead to Invalid Inference</title>
    <dc:date>2019-08-02T13:18:03+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.00520</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Researchers across the health and social sciences generally assume that observations are independent, even while relying on convenience samples that draw subjects from one or a small number of communities, schools, hospitals, etc. A paradigmatic example of this is the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). Many of the limitations of such samples are well-known, but the issue of statistical dependence due to social network ties has not previously been addressed. We show that, along with anticonservative variance estimation, this network dependence can result in confounding by network structure that biases associations away from the null. Using a statistical test that we adapted from one developed for spatial autocorrelation, we test for network dependence and for possible confounding by network structure in several of the thousands of influential papers published using FHS data. Results suggest that some of the many decades of research on coronary heart disease, other health outcomes, and peer influence using FHS data may be biased and anticonservative due to unacknowledged network dependence. We conclude that these issues are not unique to the FHS; as researchers in psychology, medicine, and beyond grapple with replication failures, this unacknowledged source of invalid statistical inference should be part of the conversation."]]></description>
<dc:subject>network_data_analysis social_networks causal_inference heard_the_talk ogburn.elizabeth in_NB have_read</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:551a8a71a8b5/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:social_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:ogburn.elizabeth"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0366">
    <title>[1307.0366] Learning directed acyclic graphs based on sparsest permutations</title>
    <dc:date>2019-07-30T17:44:29+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0366</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We consider the problem of learning a Bayesian network or directed acyclic graph (DAG) model from observational data. A number of constraint-based, score-based and hybrid algorithms have been developed for this purpose. For constraint-based methods, statistical consistency guarantees typically rely on the faithfulness assumption, which has been show to be restrictive especially for graphs with cycles in the skeleton. However, there is only limited work on consistency guarantees for score-based and hybrid algorithms and it has been unclear whether consistency guarantees can be proven under weaker conditions than the faithfulness assumption. In this paper, we propose the sparsest permutation (SP) algorithm. This algorithm is based on finding the causal ordering of the variables that yields the sparsest DAG. We prove that this new score-based method is consistent under strictly weaker conditions than the faithfulness assumption. We also demonstrate through simulations on small DAGs that the SP algorithm compares favorably to the constraint-based PC and SGS algorithms as well as the score-based Greedy Equivalence Search and hybrid Max-Min Hill-Climbing method. In the Gaussian setting, we prove that our algorithm boils down to finding the permutation of the variables with sparsest Cholesky decomposition for the inverse covariance matrix. Using this connection, we show that in the oracle setting, where the true covariance matrix is known, the SP algorithm is in fact equivalent to ℓ0-penalized maximum likelihood estimation."]]></description>
<dc:subject>graphical_models statistics causal_discovery uhler.caroline heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:327b9feb1461/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graphical_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:uhler.caroline"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06229">
    <title>[1801.06229] Anchor regression: heterogeneous data meets causality</title>
    <dc:date>2019-06-17T16:43:41+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06229</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Estimating causal parameters from observational data is notoriously difficult. Popular approaches such as regression adjustment or the instrumental variables approach only work under relatively strong assumptions and are prone to mistakes. Furthermore, causal parameters can exhibit conservative predictive performance which can limit their usefulness in practice. Causal parameters can be written as the solution to a minimax risk problem, where the maximum is taken over a range of interventional (or perturbed) distributions. This motivates anchor regression, a method that makes use of exogeneous variables to solve a relaxation of the "causal" minimax problem. The procedure naturally provides an interpolation between the solution to ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares, but also has predictive guarantees if the instrumental variables assumptions are violated. We derive guarantees of the proposed procedure for predictive performance under perturbations for the population case and for high-dimensional data. An additional characterization of the procedure is given in terms of quantiles: If the data follow a Gaussian distribution, the method minimizes quantiles of the conditional mean squared error. If anchor regression and least squares provide the same answer ("anchor stability"), the relationship between targets and predictors is unconfounded and the coefficients have a causal interpretation. Furthermore, we show under which conditions anchor regression satisfies replicability among different experiments. Anchor regression is shown empirically to improve replicability and protect against distributional shifts"]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB statistics causal_inference heard_the_talk peters.jonas buhlmann.peter regression instrumental_variables</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:a84147f9c682/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:peters.jonas"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:buhlmann.peter"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:instrumental_variables"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08527">
    <title>[1705.08527] Causal inference for social network data</title>
    <dc:date>2019-04-30T14:15:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08527</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We extend recent work by van der Laan (2014) on causal inference for causally connected units to more general social network settings. Our asymptotic results allow for dependence of each observation on a growing number of other units as sample size increases. We are not aware of any previous methods for inference about network members in observational settings that allow the number of ties per node to increase as the network grows. While previous methods have generally implicitly focused on one of two possible sources of dependence among social network observations, we allow for both dependence due to contagion, or transmission of information across network ties, and for dependence due to latent similarities among nodes sharing ties. We describe estimation and inference for causal effects that are specifically of interest in social network settings."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB to_read heard_the_talk causal_inference network_data_analysis kith_and_kin ogburn.elizabeth van_der_laan.mark re:homophily_and_confounding to_teach:baby-nets</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:911a880fa6fb/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:ogburn.elizabeth"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:van_der_laan.mark"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:homophily_and_confounding"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:baby-nets"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.03296">
    <title>[1710.03296] Testing for Network and Spatial Autocorrelation</title>
    <dc:date>2019-04-30T13:49:14+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.03296</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Testing for dependence has been a well-established component of spatial statistical analyses for decades. In particular, several popular test statistics have desirable properties for testing for the presence of spatial autocorrelation in continuous variables. In this paper we propose two contributions to the literature on tests for autocorrelation. First, we propose a new test for autocorrelation in categorical variables. While some methods currently exist for assessing spatial autocorrelation in categorical variables, the most popular method is unwieldy, somewhat ad hoc, and fails to provide grounds for a single omnibus test. Second, we discuss the importance of testing for autocorrelation in network, rather than spatial, data, motivated by applications in social network data. We demonstrate that existing tests for autocorrelation in spatial data for continuous variables and our new test for categorical variables can both be used in the network setting."]]></description>
<dc:subject>heard_the_talk ogburn.elizabeth kith_and_kin statistics spatial_statistics network_data_analysis to_teach:baby-nets to_teach:data_over_space_and_time re:neutral_cultural_networks in_NB have_read</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:2edb23fc0e33/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:ogburn.elizabeth"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:spatial_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:baby-nets"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:data_over_space_and_time"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:neutral_cultural_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10333">
    <title>[1810.10333] Memorization in Overparameterized Autoencoders</title>
    <dc:date>2019-04-11T00:38:09+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10333</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Memorization of data in deep neural networks has become a subject of significant research interest. We prove that over-parameterized single layer fully connected autoencoders memorize training data: they produce outputs in (a non-linear version of) the span of the training examples. In contrast to fully connected autoencoders, we prove that depth is necessary for memorization in convolutional autoencoders. Moreover, we observe that adding nonlinearity to deep convolutional autoencoders results in a stronger form of memorization: instead of outputting points in the span of the training images, deep convolutional autoencoders tend to output individual training images. Since convolutional autoencoder components are building blocks of deep convolutional networks, we envision that our findings will shed light on the important phenomenon of memorization in over-parameterized deep networks."

--- I heard the talk, and quite frankly had my mind blown.

--- ETA: cf. [https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:1df171804450]]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB neural_networks heard_the_talk uhler.caroline belkin.mikhail your_favorite_deep_neural_network_sucks</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:fc3c46dc71af/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:neural_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:uhler.caroline"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:belkin.mikhail"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:your_favorite_deep_neural_network_sucks"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08560">
    <title>[1903.08560] Surprises in High-Dimensional Ridgeless Least Squares Interpolation</title>
    <dc:date>2019-04-11T00:22:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08560</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Interpolators---estimators that achieve zero training error---have attracted growing attention in machine learning, mainly because state-of-the art neural networks appear to be models of this type. In this paper, we study minimum ℓ2 norm (`ridgeless') interpolation in high-dimensional least squares regression. We consider two different models for the feature distribution: a linear model, where the feature vectors xi∈ℝp are obtained by applying a linear transform to a vector of i.i.d.\ entries, xi=Σ1/2zi (with zi∈ℝp); and a nonlinear model, where the feature vectors are obtained by passing the input through a random one-layer neural network, xi=φ(Wzi) (with zi∈ℝd, W∈ℝp×d a matrix of i.i.d.\ entries, and φ an activation function acting componentwise on Wzi). We recover---in a precise quantitative way---several phenomena that have been observed in large-scale neural networks and kernel machines, including the `double descent' behavior of the prediction risk, and the potential benefits of overparametrization."

--- "Heard the talk" = "Ryan came into my office to explain it all because he was so enthused".]]></description>
<dc:subject>to_read regression high-dimensional_statistics kith_and_kin tibshirani.ryan rosset.saharon montanari.andrea hastie.trevor statistics neural_networks heard_the_talk in_NB interpolation_aka_memorizing_the_training_data</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:078d131f8f8b/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:high-dimensional_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:tibshirani.ryan"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:rosset.saharon"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:montanari.andrea"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:hastie.trevor"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:neural_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:interpolation_aka_memorizing_the_training_data"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03579">
    <title>[1810.03579] Long ties accelerate noisy threshold-based contagions</title>
    <dc:date>2018-10-12T04:04:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03579</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Changes to network structure can substantially affect when and how widely new ideas, products, and conventions are adopted. In models of biological contagion, interventions that randomly rewire edges (making them "longer") accelerate spread. However, there are other models relevant to social contagion, such as those motivated by myopic best-response in games with strategic complements, in which individual's behavior is described by a threshold number of adopting neighbors above which adoption occurs (i.e., complex contagions). Recent work has argued that highly clustered, rather than random, networks facilitate spread of these complex contagions. Here we show that minor modifications of prior analyses, which make them more realistic, reverse this result. The modification is that we allow very rarely below threshold adoption, i.e., very rarely adoption occurs, where there is only one adopting neighbor. To model the trade-off between long and short edges we consider networks that are the union of cycle-power-k graphs and random graphs on n nodes. We study how the time to global spread changes as we replace the cycle edges with (random) long ties. Allowing adoptions below threshold to occur with order 1/n‾√ probability is enough to ensure that random rewiring accelerates spread. Simulations illustrate the robustness of these results to other commonly-posited models for noisy best-response behavior. We then examine empirical social networks, where we find that hypothetical interventions that (a) randomly rewire existing edges or (b) add random edges reduce time to spread compared with the original network or addition of "short", triad-closing edges, respectively. This substantially revises conclusions about how interventions change the spread of behavior, suggesting that those wanting to increase spread should induce formation of long ties, rather than triad-closing ties."

]]></description>
<dc:subject>re:do-institutions-evolve eckles.dean heard_the_talk in_NB epidemics_on_networks have_read</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:192c47c559c5/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:do-institutions-evolve"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:eckles.dean"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:epidemics_on_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04317">
    <title>[1706.04317] Schema Networks: Zero-shot Transfer with a Generative Causal Model of Intuitive Physics</title>
    <dc:date>2018-10-10T16:55:31+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04317</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The recent adaptation of deep neural network-based methods to reinforcement learning and planning domains has yielded remarkable progress on individual tasks. Nonetheless, progress on task-to-task transfer remains limited. In pursuit of efficient and robust generalization, we introduce the Schema Network, an object-oriented generative physics simulator capable of disentangling multiple causes of events and reasoning backward through causes to achieve goals. The richly structured architecture of the Schema Network can learn the dynamics of an environment directly from data. We compare Schema Networks with Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic and Progressive Networks on a suite of Breakout variations, reporting results on training efficiency and zero-shot generalization, consistently demonstrating faster, more robust learning and better transfer. We argue that generalizing from limited data and learning causal relationships are essential abilities on the path toward generally intelligent systems"]]></description>
<dc:subject>artificial_intelligence reinforcement_learning graphical_models heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:c45fc9a765a8/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:artificial_intelligence"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:reinforcement_learning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graphical_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06642">
    <title>[1711.06642] Nonparametric independence testing via mutual information</title>
    <dc:date>2018-09-13T16:27:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06642</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We propose a test of independence of two multivariate random vectors, given a sample from the underlying population. Our approach, which we call MINT, is based on the estimation of mutual information, whose decomposition into joint and marginal entropies facilitates the use of recently-developed efficient entropy estimators derived from nearest neighbour distances. The proposed critical values, which may be obtained from simulation (in the case where one marginal is known) or resampling, guarantee that the test has nominal size, and we provide local power analyses, uniformly over classes of densities whose mutual information satisfies a lower bound. Our ideas may be extended to provide a new goodness-of-fit tests of normal linear models based on assessing the independence of our vector of covariates and an appropriately-defined notion of an error vector. The theory is supported by numerical studies on both simulated and real data."]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB heard_the_talk dependence_measures hypothesis_testing nonparametrics nearest-neighbors statistics samworth.richard_j.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:1b4719cceeb7/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:dependence_measures"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:hypothesis_testing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:nonparametrics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:nearest-neighbors"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:samworth.richard_j."/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00304">
    <title>[1606.00304] Efficient multivariate entropy estimation via $k$-nearest neighbour distances</title>
    <dc:date>2018-09-13T16:27:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00304</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Many statistical procedures, including goodness-of-fit tests and methods for independent component analysis, rely critically on the estimation of the entropy of a distribution. In this paper, we seek entropy estimators that are efficient and achieve the local asymptotic minimax lower bound with respect to squared error loss. To this end, we study weighted averages of the estimators originally proposed by Kozachenko and Leonenko (1987), based on the k-nearest neighbour distances of a sample of n independent and identically distributed random vectors in ℝd. A careful choice of weights enables us to obtain an efficient estimator in arbitrary dimensions, given sufficient smoothness, while the original unweighted estimator is typically only efficient when d≤3. In addition to the new estimator proposed and theoretical understanding provided, our results facilitate the construction of asymptotically valid confidence intervals for the entropy of asymptotically minimal width."]]></description>
<dc:subject>in_NB heard_the_talk entropy_estimation statistics nearest-neighors samworth.richard_j.</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:79295b1694da/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:entropy_estimation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:nearest-neighors"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:samworth.richard_j."/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00023">
    <title>[1808.00023] The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness: A Critical Review of Fair Machine Learning</title>
    <dc:date>2018-08-20T20:03:31+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00023</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The nascent field of fair machine learning aims to ensure that decisions guided by algorithms are equitable. Over the last several years, three formal definitions of fairness have gained prominence: (1) anti-classification, meaning that protected attributes---like race, gender, and their proxies---are not explicitly used to make decisions; (2) classification parity, meaning that common measures of predictive performance (e.g., false positive and false negative rates) are equal across groups defined by the protected attributes; and (3) calibration, meaning that conditional on risk estimates, outcomes are independent of protected attributes. Here we show that all three of these fairness definitions suffer from significant statistical limitations. Requiring anti-classification or classification parity can, perversely, harm the very groups they were designed to protect; and calibration, though generally desirable, provides little guarantee that decisions are equitable. In contrast to these formal fairness criteria, we argue that it is often preferable to treat similarly risky people similarly, based on the most statistically accurate estimates of risk that one can produce. Such a strategy, while not universally applicable, often aligns well with policy objectives; notably, this strategy will typically violate both anti-classification and classification parity. In practice, it requires significant effort to construct suitable risk estimates. One must carefully define and measure the targets of prediction to avoid retrenching biases in the data. But, importantly, one cannot generally address these difficulties by requiring that algorithms satisfy popular mathematical formalizations of fairness. By highlighting these challenges in the foundation of fair machine learning, we hope to help researchers and practitioners productively advance the area."

--- ETA: This is a really good and convincing paper.]]></description>
<dc:subject>prediction algorithmic_fairness goel.sharad via:rvenkat have_read heard_the_talk in_NB to_teach:data-mining to_teach:statistics_of_inequality_and_discrimination</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:bc431ac37e38/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:algorithmic_fairness"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:goel.sharad"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:via:rvenkat"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:data-mining"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:statistics_of_inequality_and_discrimination"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/injustice-9780190692438?lang=en&amp;cc=us#">
    <title>Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World - Paperback - Michael Goodhart - Oxford University Press</title>
    <dc:date>2018-08-14T19:08:45+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://global.oup.com/academic/product/injustice-9780190692438?lang=en&amp;cc=us#</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This book challenges the conventional approach to problems of injustice in global normative theory. It offers a radical alternative designed to transform our thinking about what kind of problem injustice is and to show how political theorists might do better in understanding and addressing it. Michael Goodhart argues that the dominant paradigm, ideal moral theory (IMT), takes a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to injustice. At the same time, leading alternatives to IMT struggle to make sense of the role values play in politics and abandon political theory's critical and prescriptive aspirations. Goodhart treats justice claims as ideological and develops an innovative bifocal theoretical framework for making sense of them. This framework reconciles realistic political analysis with substantive normative commitments, enabling theorists to come to grips with injustice as a political rather than a philosophical problem. The book describes the work that political theory and political theorists can do to combat injustice and illustrates its key arguments through a novel reconceptualization of responsibility for injustice"]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB books:noted political_philosophy moral_philosophy moral_responsibility heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:0202eb02e7dc/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:books:noted"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:political_philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:moral_philosophy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:moral_responsibility"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08105">
    <title>[1705.08105] FRK: An R Package for Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Prediction with Large Datasets</title>
    <dc:date>2018-08-07T15:44:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08105</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["FRK is an R software package for spatial/spatio-temporal modelling and prediction with large datasets. It facilitates optimal spatial prediction (kriging) on the most commonly used manifolds (in Euclidean space and on the surface of the sphere), for both spatial and spatio-temporal fields. It differs from many of the packages for spatial modelling and prediction by avoiding stationary and isotropic covariance and variogram models, instead constructing a spatial random effects (SRE) model on a fine-resolution discretised spatial domain. The discrete element is known as a basic areal unit (BAU), whose introduction in the software leads to several practical advantages. The software can be used to (i) integrate multiple observations with different supports with relative ease; (ii) obtain exact predictions at millions of prediction locations (without conditional simulation); and (iii) distinguish between measurement error and fine-scale variation at the resolution of the BAU, thereby allowing for reliable uncertainty quantification. The temporal component is included by adding another dimension. A key component of the SRE model is the specification of spatial or spatio-temporal basis functions; in the package, they can be generated automatically or by the user. The package also offers automatic BAU construction, an expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm for parameter estimation, and functionality for prediction over any user-specified polygons or BAUs. Use of the package is illustrated on several spatial and spatio-temporal datasets, and its predictions and the model it implements are extensively compared to others commonly used for spatial prediction and modelling."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to_read R heard_the_talk prediction spatial_statistics spatio-temporal_statistics to_teach:data_over_space_and_time in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:31e79e2da0ae/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:R"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:spatial_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:spatio-temporal_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:data_over_space_and_time"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07203">
    <title>[1804.07203] The Hardness of Conditional Independence Testing and the Generalised Covariance Measure</title>
    <dc:date>2018-05-18T01:12:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07203</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["It is a common saying that testing for conditional independence, i.e., testing whether X is independent of Y, given Z, is a hard statistical problem if Z is a continuous random variable. In this paper, we prove that conditional independence is indeed a particularly difficult hypothesis to test for. Statistical tests are required to have a size that is smaller than a predefined significance level, and different tests usually have power against a different class of alternatives. We prove that a valid test for conditional independence does not have power against any alternative. 
"Given the non-existence of a uniformly valid conditional independence test, we argue that tests must be designed so their suitability for a particular problem setting may be judged easily. To address this need, we propose in the case where X and Y are univariate to nonlinearly regress X on Z, and Y on Z and then compute a test statistic based on the sample covariance between the residuals, which we call the generalised covariance measure (GCM). We prove that validity of this form of test relies almost entirely on the weak requirement that the regression procedures are able to estimate the conditional means X given Z, and Y given Z, at a slow rate. We extend the methodology to handle settings where X and Y may be multivariate or even high-dimensional. 
"While our general procedure can be tailored to the setting at hand by combining it with any regression technique, we develop the theoretical guarantees for kernel ridge regression. A simulation study shows that the test based on GCM is competitive with state of the art conditional independence tests. Code will be available as an R package."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB independence_testing hypothesis_testing statistics causal_discovery heard_the_talk to_read peters.jonas nonparametrics have_skimmed</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:06e5ea6a376c/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:independence_testing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:hypothesis_testing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:peters.jonas"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:nonparametrics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_skimmed"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08576">
    <title>[1706.08576] Invariant Causal Prediction for Nonlinear Models</title>
    <dc:date>2018-05-18T01:11:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08576</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["An important problem in many domains is to predict how a system will respond to interventions. This task is inherently linked to estimating the system's underlying causal structure. To this end, 'invariant causal prediction' (ICP) (Peters et al., 2016) has been proposed which learns a causal model exploiting the invariance of causal relations using data from different environments. When considering linear models, the implementation of ICP is relatively straight-forward. However, the nonlinear case is more challenging due to the difficulty of performing nonparametric tests for conditional independence. In this work, we present and evaluate an array of methods for nonlinear and nonparametric versions of ICP for learning the causal parents of given target variables. We find that an approach which first fits a nonlinear model with data pooled over all environments and then tests for differences between the residual distributions across environments is quite robust across a large variety of simulation settings. We call this procedure "Invariant residual distribution test". In general, we observe that the performance of all approaches is critically dependent on the true (unknown) causal structure and it becomes challenging to achieve high power if the parental set includes more than two variables. As a real-world example, we consider fertility rate modelling which is central to world population projections. We explore predicting the effect of hypothetical interventions using the accepted models from nonlinear ICP. The results reaffirm the previously observed central causal role of child mortality rates."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB causal_inference causal_discovery statistics regression prediction peters.jonas meinshausen.nicolai to_read heard_the_talk to_teach:undergrad-ADA re:ADAfaEPoV</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:c56e1a37ba95/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:peters.jonas"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:meinshausen.nicolai"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:undergrad-ADA"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:ADAfaEPoV"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.01332">
    <title>[1501.01332] Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals</title>
    <dc:date>2018-05-18T01:10:13+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.01332</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What is the difference of a prediction that is made with a causal model and a non-causal model? Suppose we intervene on the predictor variables or change the whole environment. The predictions from a causal model will in general work as well under interventions as for observational data. In contrast, predictions from a non-causal model can potentially be very wrong if we actively intervene on variables. Here, we propose to exploit this invariance of a prediction under a causal model for causal inference: given different experimental settings (for example various interventions) we collect all models that do show invariance in their predictive accuracy across settings and interventions. The causal model will be a member of this set of models with high probability. This approach yields valid confidence intervals for the causal relationships in quite general scenarios. We examine the example of structural equation models in more detail and provide sufficient assumptions under which the set of causal predictors becomes identifiable. We further investigate robustness properties of our approach under model misspecification and discuss possible extensions. The empirical properties are studied for various data sets, including large-scale gene perturbation experiments."

]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB to_read causal_inference causal_discovery statistics prediction regression buhlmann.peter meinshausen.nicolai peters.jonas heard_the_talk re:ADAfaEPoV to_teach:undergrad-ADA</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:e39d59855089/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:buhlmann.peter"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:meinshausen.nicolai"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:peters.jonas"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:ADAfaEPoV"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:undergrad-ADA"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.pnas.org/content/115/11/2584">
    <title>An empirical analysis of journal policy effectiveness for computational reproducibility | PNAS</title>
    <dc:date>2018-05-07T22:34:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.pnas.org/content/115/11/2584</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["A key component of scientific communication is sufficient information for other researchers in the field to reproduce published findings. For computational and data-enabled research, this has often been interpreted to mean making available the raw data from which results were generated, the computer code that generated the findings, and any additional information needed such as workflows and input parameters. Many journals are revising author guidelines to include data and code availability. This work evaluates the effectiveness of journal policy that requires the data and code necessary for reproducibility be made available postpublication by the authors upon request. We assess the effectiveness of such a policy by (i) requesting data and code from authors and (ii) attempting replication of the published findings. We chose a random sample of 204 scientific papers published in the journal Science after the implementation of their policy in February 2011. We found that we were able to obtain artifacts from 44% of our sample and were able to reproduce the findings for 26%. We find this policy—author remission of data and code postpublication upon request—an improvement over no policy, but currently insufficient for reproducibility."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB why_oh_why_cant_we_have_a_better_academic_publishing_system heard_the_talk kith_and_kin stodden.victoria</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:d6ae4d920316/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:why_oh_why_cant_we_have_a_better_academic_publishing_system"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:stodden.victoria"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05401">
    <title>[1611.05401] Bootstrapping and Sample Splitting For High-Dimensional, Assumption-Free Inference</title>
    <dc:date>2018-04-05T15:06:34+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05401</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Several new methods have been proposed for performing valid inference after model selection. An older method is sampling splitting: use part of the data for model selection and part for inference. In this paper we revisit sample splitting combined with the bootstrap (or the Normal approximation). We show that this leads to a simple, assumption-free approach to inference and we establish results on the accuracy of the method. In fact, we find new bounds on the accuracy of the bootstrap and the Normal approximation for general nonlinear parameters with increasing dimension which we then use to assess the accuracy of regression inference. We show that an alternative, called the image bootstrap, has higher coverage accuracy at the cost of more computation. We define new parameters that measure variable importance and that can be inferred with greater accuracy than the usual regression coefficients. There is a inference-prediction tradeoff: splitting increases the accuracy and robustness of inference but can decrease the accuracy of the predictions."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk linear_regression model_selection bootstrap kith_and_kin wasserman.larry rinaldo.alessandro g'sell.max lei.jing high-dimensional_statistics statistics to_teach:linear_models post-selection_inference</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:7ccbe54bc5d5/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:linear_regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:model_selection"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:bootstrap"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:wasserman.larry"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:rinaldo.alessandro"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:g'sell.max"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:lei.jing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:high-dimensional_statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:linear_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:post-selection_inference"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1514430273">
    <title>Niezink , Snijders : Co-evolution of social networks and continuous actor attributes</title>
    <dc:date>2018-04-03T16:12:45+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1514430273</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Social networks and the attributes of the actors in these networks are not static; they may develop interdependently over time. The stochastic actor-oriented model allows for statistical inference on the mechanisms driving this co-evolution process. In earlier versions of this model, dynamic actor attributes are assumed to be measured on an ordinal categorical scale. We present an extension of the stochastic actor-oriented model that does away with this restriction using a stochastic differential equation to model the evolution of continuous actor attributes. We estimate the parameters by a procedure based on the method of moments. The proposed method is applied to study the dynamics of a friendship network among the students at an Australian high school. In particular, we model the relationship between friendship and obesity, focusing on body mass index as a continuous co-evolving attribute."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB social_networks network_data_analysis social_influence stochastic_differential_equations statistics have_read heard_the_talk to_teach:baby-nets niezink.nynke snijders.tom</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:b61846490014/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:social_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:social_influence"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:stochastic_differential_equations"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:baby-nets"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:niezink.nynke"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:snijders.tom"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/27/1619938114.short">
    <title>Empirical prediction intervals improve energy forecasting</title>
    <dc:date>2017-08-07T22:35:02+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/27/1619938114.short</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Hundreds of organizations and analysts use energy projections, such as those contained in the US Energy Information Administration (EIA)’s Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), for investment and policy decisions. Retrospective analyses of past AEO projections have shown that observed values can differ from the projection by several hundred percent, and thus a thorough treatment of uncertainty is essential. We evaluate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of several empirical density forecasting methods, using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS). The analysis confirms that a Gaussian density, estimated on past forecasting errors, gives comparatively accurate uncertainty estimates over a variety of energy quantities in the AEO, in particular outperforming scenario projections provided in the AEO. We report probabilistic uncertainties for 18 core quantities of the AEO 2016 projections. Our work frames how to produce, evaluate, and rank probabilistic forecasts in this setting. We propose a log transformation of forecast errors for price projections and a modified nonparametric empirical density forecasting method. Our findings give guidance on how to evaluate and communicate uncertainty in future energy outlooks."

--- It's probably presumptuous of me, but I am a bit proud, because the first author learned a lot of these methods from my class...]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB to_read heard_the_talk energy prediction statistics to_teach:undergrad-ADA</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:d475d9942844/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:energy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:prediction"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:undergrad-ADA"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.4391">
    <title>[0906.4391] KNIFE: Kernel Iterative Feature Extraction</title>
    <dc:date>2016-11-30T02:04:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.4391</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Selecting important features in non-linear or kernel spaces is a difficult challenge in both classification and regression problems. When many of the features are irrelevant, kernel methods such as the support vector machine and kernel ridge regression can sometimes perform poorly. We propose weighting the features within a kernel with a sparse set of weights that are estimated in conjunction with the original classification or regression problem. The iterative algorithm, KNIFE, alternates between finding the coefficients of the original problem and finding the feature weights through kernel linearization. In addition, a slight modification of KNIFE yields an efficient algorithm for finding feature regularization paths, or the paths of each feature's weight. Simulation results demonstrate the utility of KNIFE for both kernel regression and support vector machines with a variety of kernels. Feature path realizations also reveal important non-linear correlations among features that prove useful in determining a subset of significant variables. Results on vowel recognition data, Parkinson's disease data, and microarray data are also given."]]></description>
<dc:subject>statistics regression variable_selection data_mining to_teach:data-mining kernel_methods in_NB heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:061ce2697602/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:variable_selection"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:data_mining"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:data-mining"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kernel_methods"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/governed-spirit-opposition">
    <title>Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia</title>
    <dc:date>2016-08-06T01:06:45+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/governed-spirit-opposition</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["During the colonial era, ordinary Philadelphians played an unusually active role in political life. Because the city lacked a strong central government, private individuals working in civic associations of their own making shouldered broad responsibility for education, poverty relief, church governance, fire protection, and even taxation and military defense. These organizations dramatically expanded the opportunities for white men—rich and poor alike—to shape policies that immediately affected their communities and their own lives.
"In Governed by a Spirit of Opposition, Jessica Choppin Roney explains how allowing people from all walks of life to participate in political activities amplified citizen access and democratic governance. Merchants, shopkeepers, carpenters, brewers, shoemakers, and silversmiths served as churchwardens, street commissioners, constables, and Overseers of the Poor. They volunteered to fight fires, organized relief for the needy, contributed money toward the care of the sick, took up arms in defense of the community, raised capital for local lending, and even interjected themselves in Indian diplomacy. Ultimately, Roney suggests, popular participation in charity, schools, the militia, and informal banks empowered people in this critically important colonial city to overthrow the existing government in 1776 and re-envision the parameters of democratic participation.
"Governed by a Spirit of Opposition argues that the American Revolution did not occasion the birth of commonplace political activity or of an American culture of voluntary association. Rather, the Revolution built upon a long history of civic engagement and a complicated relationship between the practice of majority-rule and exclusionary policy-making on the part of appointed and self-selected constituencies."]]></description>
<dc:subject>books:noted american_history civil_society self-organization heard_the_talk where_by_&quot;heard_the_talk&quot;_i_mean_&quot;heard_it_explained_over_drinks&quot; institutions re:democratic_cognition democracy to_download in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:37f309015211/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:books:noted"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:american_history"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:civil_society"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:self-organization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:where_by_&quot;heard_the_talk&quot;_i_mean_&quot;heard_it_explained_over_drinks&quot;"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:institutions"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:democratic_cognition"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:democracy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_download"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03652">
    <title>[1507.03652] Lasso adjustments of treatment effect estimates in randomized experiments</title>
    <dc:date>2016-07-18T19:04:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03652</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We provide a principled way for investigators to analyze randomized experiments when the number of covariates is large. Investigators often use linear multivariate regression to analyze randomized experiments instead of simply reporting the difference of means between treatment and control groups. Their aim is to reduce the variance of the estimated treatment effect by adjusting for covariates. If there are a large number of covariates relative to the number of observations, regression may perform poorly because of overfitting. In such cases, the Lasso may be helpful. We study the resulting Lasso-based treatment effect estimator under the Neyman-Rubin model of randomized experiments. We present theoretical conditions that guarantee that the estimator is more efficient than the simple difference-of-means estimator, and we provide a conservative estimator of the asymptotic variance, which can yield tighter confidence intervals than the difference-of-means estimator. Simulation and data examples show that Lasso-based adjustment can be advantageous even when the number of covariates is less than the number of observations. Specifically, a variant using Lasso for selection and OLS for estimation performs particularly well, and it chooses a smoothing parameter based on combined performance of Lasso and OLS."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB heard_the_talk have_skimmed yu.bin lasso regression causal_inference statistics</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:99775c38b50e/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_skimmed"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:yu.bin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:lasso"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:regression"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00795">
    <title>[1602.00795] Gender, Productivity, and Prestige in Computer Science Faculty Hiring Networks</title>
    <dc:date>2016-02-08T21:31:26+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00795</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Women are dramatically underrepresented in computer science at all levels in academia and account for just 15% of tenure-track faculty. Understanding the causes of this gender imbalance would inform both policies intended to rectify it and employment decisions by departments and individuals. Progress in this direction, however, is complicated by the complexity and decentralized nature of faculty hiring and the non-independence of hires. Using comprehensive data on both hiring outcomes and scholarly productivity for 2659 tenure-track faculty across 205 Ph.D.-granting departments in North America, we investigate the multi-dimensional nature of gender inequality in computer science faculty hiring through a network model of the hiring process. Overall, we find that hiring outcomes are most directly affected by (i) the relative prestige between hiring and placing institutions and (ii) the scholarly productivity of the candidates. After including these, and other features, the addition of gender did not significantly reduce modeling error. However, gender differences do exist, e.g., in scholarly productivity, postdoctoral training rates, and in career movements up the rankings of universities, suggesting that the effects of gender are indirectly incorporated into hiring decisions through gender's covariates. Furthermore, we find evidence that more highly ranked departments recruit female faculty at higher than expected rates, which appears to inhibit similar efforts by lower ranked departments. These findings illustrate the subtle nature of gender inequality in faculty hiring networks and provide new insights to the underrepresentation of women in computer science."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to:NB sexism science_as_a_social_process inequality academia kith_and_kin clauset.aaron heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:28cde13c11e2/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to:NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:sexism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:science_as_a_social_process"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:inequality"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:academia"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:kith_and_kin"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:clauset.aaron"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02706">
    <title>[1510.02706] Conditional Risk Minimization for Stochastic Processes</title>
    <dc:date>2015-10-17T18:08:31+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02706</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We study the task of learning from non-i.i.d. data. In particular, we aim at learning predictors that minimize the conditional risk for a stochastic process, i.e. the expected loss taking into account the set of training samples observed so far. For non-i.i.d. data, the training set contains information about the upcoming samples, so learning with respect to the conditional distribution can be expected to yield better predictors than one obtains from the classical setting of minimizing the marginal risk. Our main contribution is a practical estimator for the conditional risk based on the theory of non-parametric time-series prediction, and a finite sample concentration bound that establishes exponential convergence of the estimator to the true conditional risk under certain regularity assumptions on the process."]]></description>
<dc:subject>learning_theory stochastic_processes re:risk_bounds_for_time_series to_teach:childs_garden_of_statistical_learning_theory in_NB have_read heard_the_talk</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:3ec04b70196f/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:learning_theory"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:stochastic_processes"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:risk_bounds_for_time_series"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:childs_garden_of_statistical_learning_theory"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:have_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06675">
    <title>[1508.06675] Consistent nonparametric estimation for heavy-tailed sparse graphs</title>
    <dc:date>2015-09-13T19:58:16+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06675</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We study graphons as a non-parametric generalization of stochastic block models, and show how to obtain compactly represented estimators for sparse networks in this framework. Our algorithms and analysis go beyond previous work in several ways. First, we relax the usual boundedness assumption for the generating graphon and instead treat arbitrary integrable graphons, so that we can handle networks with long tails in their degree distributions. Second, again motivated by real-world applications, we relax the usual assumption that the graphon is defined on the unit interval, to allow latent position graphs where the latent positions live in a more general space, and we characterize identifiability for these graphons and their underlying position spaces. 
"We analyze three algorithms. The first is a least squares algorithm, which gives an approximation we prove to be consistent for all square-integrable graphons, with errors expressed in terms of the best possible stochastic block model approximation to the generating graphon. Next, we analyze a generalization based on the cut norm, which works for any integrable graphon (not necessarily square-integrable). Finally, we show that clustering based on degrees works whenever the underlying degree distribution is absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure. Unlike the previous two algorithms, this third one runs in polynomial time."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to_read graph_limits network_data_analysis re:smoothing_adjacency_matrices cohn.henry chayes.jennifer borgs.christian heard_the_talk to_teach:graphons in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:472625b9cca4/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graph_limits"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:network_data_analysis"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:re:smoothing_adjacency_matrices"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:cohn.henry"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:chayes.jennifer"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:borgs.christian"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_teach:graphons"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgtrbd/uai2015_causal/papers/evans.pdf">
    <title>Recovery from selection bias using marginal structure in discrete models</title>
    <dc:date>2015-07-16T14:21:43+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgtrbd/uai2015_causal/papers/evans.pdf</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This paper considers the problem of inferring a discrete joint distribution from a sample subject to selection. Abstractly, we want to identify a distribution p(x, w) from its condi- tional p(x | w). We introduce new assump- tions on the marginal model for p(x), un- der which generic identification is possible. These assumptions are quite general and can easily be tested; they do not require pre- cise background knowledge of p(x) or p(w), such as proportions estimated from previous studies. We particularly consider conditional independence constraints, which often arise from graphical and causal models, although other constraints can also be used. We show that generic identifiability of causal effects is possible in a much wider class of causal mod- els than had previously been known."]]></description>
<dc:subject>graphical_models identifiability statistics categorical_data partial_identification algebra heard_the_talk didelez.vanessa in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:cd6ef048a15b/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graphical_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:identifiability"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:categorical_data"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:partial_identification"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:algebra"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:didelez.vanessa"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgtrbd/uai2015_causal/papers/didelez.pdf">
    <title>Causal Reasoning for Events in Continuous Time: A Decision-Theoretic Approach</title>
    <dc:date>2015-07-16T12:18:16+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgtrbd/uai2015_causal/papers/didelez.pdf</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The dynamics of events occurring in continu- ous time can be modelled using marked point processes, or multi-state processes. Here, we review and extend the work of Røysland et al. (2015) on causal reasoning with local inde- pendence graphs for marked point processes in the context of survival analysis. We relate the results to the decision-theoretic approach of Dawid & Didelez (2010) using influence diagrams, and present additional identifying conditions."

--- VD suggests, orally, that the key bit here is the Doob-Meyer decomposition, and so the concepts may extend to, e.g., solutions of stochastic differential equations.]]></description>
<dc:subject>time_series point_processes causality causal_inference graphical_models statistics didelez.vanessa stochastic_processes heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:90bcda1d9c9f/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:time_series"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:point_processes"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causality"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_inference"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graphical_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:didelez.vanessa"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:stochastic_processes"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://auai.org/uai2015/proceedings/papers/293.pdf">
    <title>Robust reconstruction of causal graphical models based on 2-point and 3-point conditional information</title>
    <dc:date>2015-07-15T14:27:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://auai.org/uai2015/proceedings/papers/293.pdf</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["We report a novel network reconstruction method, which combines constraint-based and Bayesian frameworks to reliably reconstruct graphical models despite inherent sampling noise in finite observational datasets. The approach is based on an information theory result trac- ing back the existence of colliders in graphi- cal models to negative conditional 3-point in- formation between observed variables. In turn, this provides a confident assessment of structural independencies in causal graphs, based on the ranking of their most likely contributing nodes with (significantly) positive conditional 3-point information. Starting from a complete undi- rected graph, dispensible edges are progressively pruned by iteratively “taking off” the most likely positive conditional 3-point information from the 2-point (mutual) information between each pair of nodes. The resulting network skeleton is then partially directed by orienting and propa- gating edge directions, based on the sign and magnitude of the conditional 3-point informa- tion of unshielded triples. This “3off2” net- work reconstruction approach is shown to out- perform constraint-based, search-and-score and earlier hybrid methods on a range of benchmark networks."]]></description>
<dc:subject>to_read causal_discovery graphical_models information_theory statistics heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:410a728456ba/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:to_read"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:graphical_models"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:information_theory"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://auai.org/uai2015/proceedings/papers/86.pdf">
    <title>Learning the Structure of Causal Models with Relational and Temporal Dependence</title>
    <dc:date>2015-07-15T14:21:43+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://auai.org/uai2015/proceedings/papers/86.pdf</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Many real-world domains are inherently rela- tional and temporal—they consist of heteroge- neous entities that interact with each other over time. Effective reasoning about causality in such domains requires representations that explicitly model relational and temporal dependence. In this work, we provide a formalization of tem- poral relational models. We define temporal ex- tensions to abstract ground graphs—a lifted rep- resentation that abstracts paths of dependence over all possible ground graphs. Temporal ab- stract ground graphs enable a sound and com- plete method for answering d-separation queries on temporal relational models. These methods provide the foundation for a constraint-based al- gorithm, TRCD, that learns causal models from temporal relational data. We provide experimen- tal evidence that demonstrates the need to explic- itly represent time when inferring causal depen- dence. We also demonstrate the expressive gain of TRCD compared to earlier algorithms that do not explicitly represent time."]]></description>
<dc:subject>causal_discovery relational_learning machine_learning statistics jensen.david heard_the_talk in_NB</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:f7fd05fd054c/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:causal_discovery"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:relational_learning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:machine_learning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:statistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:jensen.david"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:heard_the_talk"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/t:in_NB"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://auai.org/uai2015/proceedings/papers/127.pdf">
    <title>Do-calculus when the true graph is unknown</title>
    <dc:date>2015-07-15T14:18:09+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://auai.org/uai2015/proceedings/papers/127.pdf</link>
    <dc:creator>cshalizi</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["One of the basic tasks of causal discovery is to estimate the causal effect of some set of variables on another given a statistical data set. In this article we bridge the gap between causal struc- ture discovery and the do-calculus by proposing a method for the identification of causal effects on the basis of arbitrary (equivalence) classes of semi-Markovian causal models. The approach uses a general logical representation of the equiv- alence class of graphs obtained from a causal structure discovery algorithm, the properties of which can then be queried by procedures im- plementing the do-calculus inference for causal effects. We show that the method is more ef- ficient than determining causal effects using a naive enumeration of graphs in the equivalence class. Moreover, the method is complete with respect to the identifiability of causal effects for settings, in which extant methods that do not re- quire knowledge of the true graph, offer only in- complete results. The method is entirely modular and easily adapted for different background set- tings."

(Last tag is just a to-mention.)]]></description>
<dc:subject>heard_the_talk to_read causal_inference causal_discovery graphical_models statistics eberhardt.frederick kith_and_kin re:ADAfaEPoV in_NB</dc:subject>
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