Chaitanya Joshi, Charné Nel, Javier Cano, Devon L.L. Polaschek
{"title":"Parole Board Decision-Making using Adversarial Risk Analysis","authors":"Chaitanya Joshi, Charné Nel, Javier Cano, Devon L.L. Polaschek","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2024.2303416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2024.2303416","url":null,"abstract":"Adversarial Risk Analysis (ARA) allows for much more realistic modeling of game theoretic decision problems than Bayesian game theory. While ARA solutions for various applications have been discuss...","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139510783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lauren D. Liao, Yeyi Zhu, Amanda L. Ngo, Rana F. Chehab, Samuel D. Pimentel
{"title":"Prioritizing Variables for Observational Study Design using the Joint Variable Importance Plot","authors":"Lauren D. Liao, Yeyi Zhu, Amanda L. Ngo, Rana F. Chehab, Samuel D. Pimentel","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2024.2303419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2024.2303419","url":null,"abstract":"Observational studies of treatment effects require adjustment for confounding variables. However, causal inference methods typically cannot deliver perfect adjustment on all measured baseline varia...","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139407646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hitting a prime by rolling a die with infinitely many faces","authors":"Shane Chern","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2023.2290720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2023.2290720","url":null,"abstract":"Alon and Malinovsky recently proved that it takes on average 2.42849… rolls of fair six-sided dice until the first time the total sum of all rolls arrives at a prime. Naturally, one may extend the...","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":" 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138473493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Using Conformal Win Probability to Predict the Winners of the Canceled 2020 NCAA Basketball Tournaments","authors":"Chancellor Johnstone, Dan Nettleton","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2023.2283199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2023.2283199","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for the cancellation of both the men’s and women’s 2020 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I basketball tournaments. Starting from the po...","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"61 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138438948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American StatisticianPub Date : 2023-01-01Epub Date: 2022-04-11DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2022.2051605
Rachael C Aikens, Michael Baiocchi
{"title":"Assignment-Control Plots: A Visual Companion for Causal Inference Study Design.","authors":"Rachael C Aikens, Michael Baiocchi","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2022.2051605","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00031305.2022.2051605","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>An important step for any causal inference study design is understanding the distribution of the subjects in terms of measured baseline covariates. However, not all baseline variation is equally important. We propose a set of visualizations that reduce the space of measured covariates into two components of baseline variation important to the design of an observational causal inference study: a propensity score summarizing baseline variation associated with treatment assignment, and prognostic score summarizing baseline variation associated with the untreated potential outcome. These <i>assignment-control plots</i> and variations thereof visualize study design trade-offs and illustrate core methodological concepts in causal inference. As a practical demonstration, we apply assignment-control plots to a hypothetical study of cardiothoracic surgery. To demonstrate how these plots can be used to illustrate nuanced concepts, we use them to visualize unmeasured confounding and to consider the relationship between propensity scores and instrumental variables. While the family of visualization tools for studies of causality is relatively sparse, simple visual tools can be an asset to education, application, and methods development.</p>","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"77 1","pages":"72-84"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9916271/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10712591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American StatisticianPub Date : 2023-01-01Epub Date: 2022-09-23DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2022.2110938
Alan D Hutson, Han Yu
{"title":"The Sign Test, Paired Data, and Asymmetric Dependence: A Cautionary Tale.","authors":"Alan D Hutson, Han Yu","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2022.2110938","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00031305.2022.2110938","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the paired data setting, the sign test is often described in statistical textbooks as a test for comparing differences between the medians of two marginal distributions. There is an implicit assumption that the median of the differences is equivalent to the difference of the medians when employing the sign test in this fashion. We demonstrate however that given asymmetry in the bivariate distribution of the paired data, there are often scenarios where the median of the differences is not equal to the difference of the medians. Further, we show that these scenarios will lead to a false interpretation of the sign test for its intended use in the paired data setting. We illustrate the false-interpretation concept via theory, a simulation study, and through a real-world example based on breast cancer RNA sequencing data obtained from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).</p>","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"77 1","pages":"35-40"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10275333/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9708928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Expressing regret: a unified view of credible intervals.","authors":"Kenneth Rice, Lingbo Ye","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2022.2039764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2022.2039764","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Posterior uncertainty is typically summarized as a credible interval, an interval in the parameter space that contains a fixed proportion - usually 95% - of the posterior's support. For multivariate parameters, credible sets perform the same role. There are of course many potential 95% intervals from which to choose, yet even standard choices are rarely justified in any formal way. In this paper we give a general method, focusing on the loss function that motivates an estimate - the Bayes rule - around which we construct a credible set. The set contains all points which, as estimates, would have minimally-worse expected loss than the Bayes rule: we call this excess expected loss 'regret'. The approach can be used for any model and prior, and we show how it justifies all widely-used choices of credible interval/set. Further examples show how it provides insights into more complex estimation problems.</p>","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"76 3","pages":"248-256"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9401190/pdf/nihms-1798412.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9117292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rachel C Nethery, Jarvis T Chen, Nancy Krieger, Pamela D Waterman, Emily Peterson, Lance A Waller, Brent A Coull
{"title":"Statistical implications of endogeneity induced by residential segregation in small-area modelling of health inequities.","authors":"Rachel C Nethery, Jarvis T Chen, Nancy Krieger, Pamela D Waterman, Emily Peterson, Lance A Waller, Brent A Coull","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2021.2003245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2021.2003245","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Health inequities are assessed by health departments to identify social groups disproportionately burdened by disease and by academic researchers to understand how social, economic, and environmental inequities manifest as health inequities. To characterize inequities, group-specific small-area health data are often modeled using log-linear generalized linear models (GLM) or generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) with a random intercept. These approaches estimate the same marginal rate ratio comparing disease rates across groups under standard assumptions. Here we explore how residential segregation combined with social group differences in disease risk can lead to contradictory findings from the GLM and GLMM. We show that this occurs because small-area disease rate data collected under these conditions induce endogeneity in the GLMM due to correlation between the model's offset and random effect. This results in GLMM estimates that represent conditional rather than marginal associations. We refer to endogeneity arising from the offset, which to our knowledge has not been noted previously, as \"offset endogeneity\". We illustrate this phenomenon in simulated data and real premature mortality data, and we propose alternative modeling approaches to address it. We also introduce to a statistical audience the social epidemiologic terminology for framing health inequities, which enables responsible interpretation of results.</p>","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"76 2","pages":"142-151"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9070859/pdf/nihms-1762308.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10541651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American StatisticianPub Date : 2021-01-01Epub Date: 2021-01-31DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2020.1865198
Samuel Thomas, Wanzhu Tu
{"title":"Learning Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in R.","authors":"Samuel Thomas, Wanzhu Tu","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2020.1865198","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00031305.2020.1865198","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful tool for Bayesian computation. In comparison with the traditional Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, HMC offers greater computational efficiency, especially in higher dimensional or more complex modeling situations. To most statisticians, however, the idea of HMC comes from a less familiar origin, one that is based on the theory of classical mechanics. Its implementation, either through Stan or one of its derivative programs, can appear opaque to beginners. A lack of understanding of the inner working of HMC, in our opinion, has hindered its application to a broader range of statistical problems. In this article, we review the basic concepts of HMC in a language that is more familiar to statisticians, and we describe an HMC implementation in R, one of the most frequently used statistical software environments. We also present hmclearn, an R package for learning HMC. This package contains a general-purpose HMC function for data analysis. We illustrate the use of this package in common statistical models. In doing so, we hope to promote this powerful computational tool for wider use. Example code for common statistical models is presented as supplementary material for online publication.</p>","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"75 4","pages":"403-413"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10353725/pdf/nihms-1670958.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9852609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American StatisticianPub Date : 2021-01-01Epub Date: 2019-05-31DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2019.1595144
D Andrew Brown, Christopher S McMahan, Stella Watson Self
{"title":"Sampling Strategies for Fast Updating of Gaussian Markov Random Fields.","authors":"D Andrew Brown, Christopher S McMahan, Stella Watson Self","doi":"10.1080/00031305.2019.1595144","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00031305.2019.1595144","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) are popular for modeling dependence in large areal datasets due to their ease of interpretation and computational convenience afforded by the sparse precision matrices needed for random variable generation. Typically in Bayesian computation, GMRFs are updated jointly in a block Gibbs sampler or componentwise in a single-site sampler via the full conditional distributions. The former approach can speed convergence by updating correlated variables all at once, while the latter avoids solving large matrices. We consider a sampling approach in which the underlying graph can be cut so that conditionally independent sites are updated simultaneously. This algorithm allows a practitioner to parallelize updates of subsets of locations or to take advantage of 'vectorized' calculations in a high-level language such as R. Through both simulated and real data, we demonstrate computational savings that can be achieved versus both single-site and block updating, regardless of whether the data are on a regular or an irregular lattice. The approach provides a good compromise between statistical and computational efficiency and is accessible to statisticians without expertise in numerical analysis or advanced computing.</p>","PeriodicalId":50801,"journal":{"name":"American Statistician","volume":"75 1","pages":"52-65"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7954130/pdf/nihms-1547742.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25485801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}