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94.5% Certain That Covid Vaccine Will Be Less Than 94.5% Effective

“On Sunday, an independent monitoring board broke the code to examine 95 infections that were recorded starting two weeks after volunteers’ second dose — and discovered all but five illnesses occurred in participants who got the placebo.”Moderna Says Its COVID-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective In Early Tests The data

Fat Or Not: Toward 'Proper Training of DL Models'

A new paper introduces a DL model to enable ‘computer aided diagnosis of obesity.’ Some concerns: 1. Better baselines: BMI is easy to calculate and it would be useful to compare the results to BMI. 2. Incorrect statement: The authors write: “the data partition in all the image sets are

Not So Robust: The Limitations of "Doubly Robust" ATE Estimators

Doubly Robust (DR) estimators of ATE are all the rage. One popular DR estimator is Robins’ Augmented IPW (AIPW). The reason why Robins’ AIPW estimator is called doubly robust is that if either your IPW model or your y ~ x model is correctly specified, you get ATE. Great! Calling something

Instrumental Music: When It Rains, It Pours

In a new paper, Jon Mellon reviews 185 papers that use weather as an instrument and finds that researchers have linked 137 variables to weather. You can read it as each paper needing to contend with 136 violations of the exclusion restriction, but the situation is likely less dire. For

What’s the Next Best Thing to Learn?

With Gaurav Gandhi Recommendation engines are everywhere. These systems recommend what shows to watch on Netflix and what products to buy on Amazon. Since at least the Netflix Prize, the conventional wisdom is that recommendation engines have become very good. Except that they are not. Some of the deficiencies are

Unmatched: The Problem With Comparing Matching Methods

In many matching papers, the key claim proceeds as follows: our matching method is better than others because on this set of contrived data, treatment effect estimates are closest to those from the ‘gold standard’ (experimental evidence). Let’s side-step concerns related to an important point: evidence that a method

Optimal Recruitment For Experiments: Using Pair-Wise Matching Distance to Guide Recruitment

Pairwise matching before randomization reduces s.e. (see below, for instance). Generally, the strategy is used to create balanced control and treatment groups from available observations. But we can use the insight for optimal sample recruitment, especially in cases where we have a large panel of respondents with baseline data,

Rent-seeking: Why It Is Better to Rent than to Buy Books

It has taken me a long time to realize that renting books is the way to go for most books. The frequency with which I go back to a book is so low that I don’t really see any returns on permanent possession that accrue from the ability to

STEMing the Rot: Does Relative Deprivation Explain Low STEM Graduation Rates at Top Schools?

The following few paragraphs are from Sociation Today: Using the work of Elliot (et al. 1996), Gladwell compares the proportion of each class that gets a STEM degree compared to the math SAT at Hartwick College and Harvard University. Here is what he presents for Hartwick: Students at Hartwick College

Campaigns, Construction, and Moviemaking

American presidential political campaigns, big construction projects, and big-budget moviemaking have a lot in common. They are all complex enterprises with lots of moving parts; they all bring together lots of people for a short period, and they all need people to hit the ground running and execute in lockstep