Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University

We’ve heard a lot about the replication crisis in science.  Now it’s time to consider solutions from several directions including institutions (changing incentives in scientific practice and reporting), design and data collection (higher-quality measurement and within-person designs), and statistical analysis (multilevel modeling and Bayesian inference or regularization).  We discuss examples from political science, economics, psychology, and medicine.

We also discuss some widely recommended ideas which we think would be useless or even counterproductive, ideas which are not as rigorous as one might think.

Here are some relevant articles: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/incrementalism_3.pdf http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/jasa_signif_2.pdf http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/abandon.pdf

Biography

Andrew Gelman (Ph.D., Harvard, 1990) is Higgins Professor of Statistics, Professor of Political Science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.  He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of forty.

Professor Gelman’s research spans a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City; the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that one vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in home basements; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.

A networking reception will be held at 6:00 PM at Clayton Hall with light food and beverages.

The W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science, which is sponsored by an endowment from the Gore family, features experts in the application of probability, statistics, and experimental design to decision making, including applications in academia, business, government, engineering and medicine.

The lecture series recognizes the key role that the fields of probability, statistics, and experimental design have played in the success of W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc. The inaugural lecture in this series was given in March 2011.