A popular idea in quantitative social sciences is to think of a cause (C) as something that increases the probability of its effect or outcome (O). That is: P(O|C) > P(O|-C) However, as is also well known, a correlation between two variables, say A and B, does not necessarily imply that one is a cause […]
Statistics & Econometrics
The point of the discussion, of course, has to do with where Koopmans thinks we should look for “autonomous behaviour relations”. He appeals to experience but in a somewhat oblique manner. He refers to the Harvard barometer “to show that relationships between economic variables … not traced to underlying behaviour equations are unreliable as instruments […]
. Entertaining and informative at the same time. Great! In case you know some Python you could try this little code snippet that yours truly wrote to simulate and plot a special kind of random walk called ‘Brownian motion.’
There have been over four decades of econometric research on business cycles … But the significance of the formalization becomes more difficult to identify when it is assessed from the applied perspective … The wide conviction of the superiority of the methods of the science has converted the econometric community largely to a group of […]
. This insightful video confirms what I always like to emphasize to my doctoral students: Statistics is no substitute for thinking. A non-trivial part of teaching statistics is made up of learning students to perform significance testing. A problem I have noticed repeatedly over the years, however, is that no matter how careful you try […]
Biomedical, psychological, and social sciences are “soft” insofar as they focus on phenomena whose regularities are amorphous and situational (in contrast to the universal, exact laws which dominate physical sciences). In doing so, they must confront another major source of research uncertainty: Living organisms are characterized by natural variation and complex feedback within and across […]
In much of science and medicine, the assumptions behind standard teaching, terminology, and interpretations of statistics are usually false, and hence the answers they provide to real-world questions are misleading … In light of this harsh reality, we should ask what meaning (if any) can we assign to the P-values, “statistical significance” declarations, “confidence” intervals, […]
. For more on the pitfalls and intricacies of statistical tests and confidence intervals, have a look at this article by Sander Greenland et al.