Teaching
Sociology Statistics Reading Group
The Sociology Statistics Reading Group was an approximately bi-weekly group for discussing statistical methods papers drawn from a wide range of literatures. Each meeting centered on a paper or small set of papers, with one discussant walking through the material before a broader group discussion. The presentations below often draw figures from the original papers and, in some cases, from presentations generously shared by the paper authors.
Year 4: 2021-2022
Coordinator: Lai Wei
October 14, 2021
Conformal Inference and Applications in Synthetic Controls
Jing Lei, Max G'Sell, Alessandro Rinaldo, Ryan J. Tibshirani, and Larry Wasserman, "Distribution-Free Predictive Inference for Regression"; Victor Chernozhukov, Kaspar Wuthrich, and Yinchu Zhu, "An Exact and Robust Conformal Inference Method for Counterfactual and Synthetic Controls." Presenter: Chris Felton.
September 30, 2021
External Validity
Naoki Egami and Erin Hartman, "Elements of External Validity: Framework, Design, and Analysis." Presenter: Angela Li.
September 9, 2021
Status Exchange
Yu Xie and Hao Dong, "A New Methodological Framework for Studying Status Exchange in Marriage." Presenter: Ziyao Tian.
Year 3: 2018-2019
Coordinators: Rebecca Johnson and Simone Zhang
May 1, 2019
Word Embeddings and Fairness
Garg et al., "Word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes." Presenter: Ziyao Tian.
April 24, 2019
Measuring Paradigmaticness with Text
Evans, Gomez, and McFarland, "Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text." Presenter: Alex Kindel.
March 13, 2019
Working with Body Camera Data
Voigt et al., "Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect." Presenter: Simone Zhang.
February 20, 2019
Versions of Treatment
Hernan, "Does water kill? A call for less casual causal inferences." Presenter: Ian Lundberg.
November 29, 2018
Machine Learning and Causal Inference
Chernozhukov et al., "Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters." Presenter: Chris Felton.
November 8, 2018
Sequence Analysis
Aisenbrey and Fasang, "New life for old ideas: The second wave of sequence analysis bringing the course back into the life course." Presenter: Daniela Urbina Julio.
October 25, 2018
Fairness in Machine Learning
Corbett-Davies and Goel, "The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness"; Lakkaraju et al., "The Selective Labels Problem." Presenter: Rebecca Johnson.
October 4, 2018
Computer Vision and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton, "Deep Learning"; optional materials from Fei-Fei Li and Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville. Presenter: Han Zhang.
Year 2: 2017-2018
Coordinator: Ian Lundberg
May 3, 2018
Gradient Boosting
Efron and Hastie, Computer Age Statistical Inference, Sections 17.2-17.4. Presenter: Jeremy Cohen.
April 19, 2018
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models
Block et al., "Change we can believe in." Presenter: Daniel Karell.
March 29, 2018
Machine Learning and Personalized Policy
Bansak et al., "Improving refugee integration through data-driven algorithmic assignment." Presenter: Hannah Postel.
March 8, 2018
Scale-Free Networks
Barabasi, Network Science, Chapter 4; Broido and Clauset, "Scale-free networks are rare." Presenter: Cambria Naslund.
March 1, 2018
LASSO and Causal Inference
Belloni, Chernozhukov, and Hansen; Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman. Presenter: Daniela Urbina Julio.
February 8, 2018
Mixture of Regressions
Imai and Tingley, "A Statistical Method for Empirical Testing of Competing Theories." Presenter: Ryan Parsons.
December 14, 2017
High-Dimensional Interactions
Egami and Imai, "Causal Interaction in Factorial Experiments: Application to Conjoint Analysis." Presenter: Belen Unzueta.
November 9, 2017
Sensitivity Analysis
Ding and VanderWeele, "Sensitivity Analysis Without Assumptions." Presenter: Chris Felton.
October 26, 2017
Exponential Random Graph Models
Robins, Pattison, Kalish, and Lusher, "An introduction to exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks." Presenter: Janet Xu.
October 12, 2017
Causal Forests
Athey and Imbens, "Recursive partitioning for heterogeneous causal effects." Presenter: Ian Lundberg.
September 28, 2017
Problems with p-values
Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn; Greenland et al. Presenter: Xinyi Duan.
September 14, 2017
Predictive Social Science
Collins; Hofman, Sharma, and Watts; Cranmer and Desmarais. Presenter: Alex Kindel.
Year 1: 2016-2017
Coordinator: Clark Bernier
May 4, 2017
Weights in Survey Experiments
Franco, Malhotra, Simonovits, and Zigerell; Miratrix, Sekhon, Theodoridis, and Campos. Presenter: Janet Xu.
April 19, 2017
Mixed Factor Analysis
Quinn, "Bayesian Factor Analysis for Mixed Ordinal and Continuous Responses." Presenter: Ryan Parsons.
March 30, 2017
Fixed Effects
Imai and Kim, "When Should We Use Linear Fixed Effects Regression Models for Causal Inference With Longitudinal Data?" Presenter: Jeremy Cohen.
March 16, 2017
Ecological Inference
King, Rosen, and Tanner; Imai and Khanna; optional King et al. Presenter: Simone Zhang.
March 2, 2017
Conjoint Analysis
Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto, "Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis." Presenter: Xinyi Duan.
February 16, 2017
Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels
Airoldi, Blei, Fienberg, and Xing. Presenter: Herissa Lamothe.
December 1, 2016
Cross-Validation
Ward, Greenhill, and Bakke; selections from Andrew Ng and Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman. Presenter: Alex Kindel.
November 10, 2016
Front-door Adjustment Strategies
Glynn and Kashin, "Front-door Versus Back-door Adjustment with Unmeasured Confounding." Presenter: Ethan Fosse.
October 27, 2016
Sensitivity Analysis
Blackwell; Morgan and Winship. Presenter: Rebecca Johnson.
October 13, 2016
Mediation
Imai, Keele, Tingley, and Yamamoto; Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen. Presenter: Ian Lundberg.
September 29, 2016
Interactions
Hainmueller, Mummolo, and Xu, "How Much Should We Trust Estimates from Multiplicative Interaction Models?" Presenter: Jason Windawi.
September 22, 2016
Colliders
Elwert and Winship, "Endogenous selection bias: The problem of conditioning on a collider variable." Presenter: Han Zhang.