Related papers: A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics
We provide two methodological insights on \emph{ex ante} policy evaluation for macro models of economic development. First, we show that the problems of parameter instability and lack of behavioral constancy can be overcome by considering…
The use of statistical software in academia and enterprises has been evolving over the last years. More often than not, students, professors, workers, and users, in general, have all had, at some point, exposure to statistical software.…
Algorithmic statistics considers the following problem: given a binary string $x$ (e.g., some experimental data), find a "good" explanation of this data. It uses algorithmic information theory to define formally what is a good explanation.…
Statistics has moved beyond the frequentist-Bayesian controversies of the past. Where does this leave our ability to interpret results? I suggest that a philosophy compatible with statistical practice, labeled here statistical pragmatism,…
Within the continuous endeavour of improving the efficiency and resilience of air transport, the trend of using concepts and metrics from statistical physics has recently gained momentum. This scientific discipline, which integrates…
In this work we introduce declarative statistics, a suite of declarative modelling tools for statistical analysis. Statistical constraints represent the key building block of declarative statistics. First, we introduce a range of relevant…
We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…
There is currently a renewed interest in the Bayesian predictive approach to statistics. This paper offers a review on foundational concepts and focuses on predictive modeling, which by directly reasoning on prediction, bypasses inferential…
Data have power. As such, most discussions of data presume that records should mirror some idealized ground truth. Deviations are viewed as failure. Drawing on two ethnographic studies of state data-making in a Chinese street-level…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…
As the twin movements of open science and open source bring an ever greater share of the scientific process into the digital realm, new opportunities arise for the meta-scientific study of science itself, including of data science and…
The purpose of this paper is to present a mathematical theory that can be used as a foundation for statistics that include improper priors. This theory includes improper laws in the initial axioms and has in particular Bayes theorem as a…
Several authors, including the American Statistician (ASA), have noted the challenges facing statisticians when attacking large, complex, unstructured problems, as opposed to well-defined textbook problems. Clearly, the standard paradigm of…
At face value, this essay is about understanding a fairly esoteric governance tool called compute thresholds. However, in order to grapple with whether these thresholds will achieve anything, we must first understand how they came to be. To…
The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of…
Improving public policy is one of the key roles of governments, and they can do this in an evidence-based way using administrative data. Causal inference for observational data improves on current practice of using descriptive or predictive…
It is argued from several points of view that quantum probabilities might play a role in statistical settings. New approaches toward quantum foundations have postulates that appear to be equally valid in macroscopic settings. One such…
Epidemiologists have a growing interest in employing computational approaches to solve analytic problems, with simulation being arguably the most accessible among all approaches. While previous literature discussed the utility of simulation…
Statistics New Zealand (Stats NZ) has committed unreservedly to an administrative data first policy. Thus, all new methods used at Stats NZ are to be viewed within this context and discussing strategies for using administrative data is an…