Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009)

Date: 

Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel K354

Today's speaker: Max Goplerud (Harvard, Gov), "Modelling Heterogeneity Using Bayesian Structured Sparsity"

Abstract: How to estimate heterogeneity, e.g. the effect of some variable differing across observations, is a key question in political science. Methods for doing so make simplifying assumptions about the underlying nature of the heterogeneity to draw reliable inferences. This paper allows a common way of simplifying complex phenomenon (placing observations with similar effects into discrete groups) to be integrated into regression analysis. The framework allows researchers to (i) use their prior knowledge to guide which groups are permissible and (ii) appropriately quantify uncertainty. The paper does this by translating work on "structured sparsity" from a penalized likelihood approach into a Bayesian prior and deriving theoretical results on posterior propriety and inference. It shows that this method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for estimating heterogeneous effects when the underlying heterogeneity is grouped and more effectively identifies groups of observations with different effects in observational data. A link to the paper can be found at j.mp/goplerud_sparsity.

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers. Free lunch is provided.

More information is available at the Gov 3009 website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009