Melody Huang
@melodyyhuang.bsky.social
📤 1581
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Currently @ Yale, working on causal inference & cutting down on caffeine. Website: melodyyhuang.com
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Melody Huang
Ben Recht
29 days ago
In lieu of lecture blogging on simulation and prediction, check out this fortuitously timed op-ed in the NY Times by
@leifw.bsky.social
and me on the absurdity of Silicon Sampling. (Related lecture blog tomorrow!)
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Opinion | It’s Called Silicon Sampling, and It’s Going to Ruin Public Opinion Polling
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html
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John Mullahy
about 1 month ago
"Frog," said Toad, "let us do one very last sensitivity analysis, and then we will stop."
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Melody Huang
Institute for Quantitative Social Science @ Harvard
2 months ago
Weds at 12:00 ET:
#Yale
assistant professor
@melodyyhuang.bsky.social
presents "Relative Bias Under Imperfect Identification in Observational
#CausalInference
" at this week's
#AppliedStatistics
workshop.
#politicalscience
#statistics
appliedstatsworkshopgov3009.hsites.harvard.edu/event/melody...
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Melody Huang (Yale) | Applied Statistics Workshop Gov 3009
Breadcrumbs
https://appliedstatsworkshopgov3009.hsites.harvard.edu/event/melody-huang-yale
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Melody Huang
BART
3 months ago
Congrats to BART rider and Oakland legend Alysa Liu on winning a gold medal at the Olympics and making the Bay Area proud!
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Anton Strezhnev
3 months ago
I keep coming back to
@cdsamii.bsky.social
essay on the “problem-centered” over “puzzle-centered” research paradigm and I can’t help but feel like so many problems with social science methods boil down to this
cyrussamii.com?p=3682
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The “problem solving” approach and social science methodology – Cyrus Samii
https://cyrussamii.com/?p=3682
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Randall Munroe
3 months ago
Proof Without Content
xkcd.com/3201/
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Cyrus Samii
5 months ago
A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution:
cyrussamii.com?p=4168
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Dan de Kadt
5 months ago
To me this is a depressing theme in modern academia. There is so much work being produced, and so many competing demands on our time, that people rarely seem able to just closely read work and frankly say "yes, I believe this" or "no, I don't." If we aren't doing this, what _are_ we doing?!
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Josh McCrain
6 months ago
new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
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Johan Ugander
6 months ago
Excellent report on experiences of
@guidoimbens.bsky.social
& Mary Wootters co-teaching "Causality, Decision Making, and Data Science" to undergrads at Stanford fall 2024:
hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/uynpjlow...
Course material here:
stanford-causal-inference-class.github.io
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Excited to see our paper on evaluating whether AI can help humans make better decisions is now out in
@pnas.org
!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Does AI help humans make better decisions? A statistical evaluation framework for experimental and observational studies | PNAS
The use of AI, or more generally data-driven algorithms, has become ubiquitous in today’s society. Yet, in many cases and especially when stakes ar...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2505106122
7 months ago
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Melody Huang
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
8 months ago
Going to include this on my slides about partial identification
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Melody Huang
Emma Zang
8 months ago
The Yale Population Studies Workshop is live! Check out our fall lineup here:
isps.yale.edu/population-s...
Speakers span sociology, economics, medicine, and political science. Both Yale and non-Yale folks are welcome to sign up for the email listserv!
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Population Studies Workshop | Institution for Social and Policy Studies
https://isps.yale.edu/population-studies-workshop
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Melody Huang
Chris Kenny, PhD
9 months ago
Could that be
@melodyyhuang.bsky.social
's new
#rstats
package for sensitivity analyses? đź‘€
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Cory McCartan
9 months ago
Lots of different ways to do observational causal inference—IV, proximal inference, etc. What if you could compare those strategies more directly? New preprint w/
@melodyyhuang.bsky.social
tries to do just that. Here's one cool figure—we're able to visualize bias of 3 estimators on the same plot
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New working paper with
@corymccartan.com
on comparing the relative bias of different identification approaches! We compare the bias of selection-on-observables, instrumental variables, and proximal inference estimates under violations of their identifying assumptions.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.23743
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Relative Bias Under Imperfect Identification in Observational Causal Inference
To conduct causal inference in observational settings, researchers must rely on certain identifying assumptions. In practice, these assumptions are unlikely to hold exactly. This paper considers the bias of selection-on-observables, instrumental variables, and proximal inference estimates under violations of their identifying assumptions. We develop bias expressions for IV and proximal inference that show how violations of their respective assumptions are amplified by any unmeasured confounding in the outcome variable. We propose a set of sensitivity tools that quantify the sensitivity of different identification strategies, and an augmented bias contour plot visualizes the relationship between these strategies. We argue that the act of choosing an identification strategy implicitly expresses a belief about the degree of violations that must be present in alternative identification strategies. Even when researchers intend to conduct an IV or proximal analysis, a sensitivity analysis comparing different identification strategies can help to better understand the implications of each set of assumptions. Throughout, we compare the different approaches on a re-analysis of the impact of state surveillance on the incidence of protest in Communist Poland.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23743
9 months ago
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Randall Munroe
10 months ago
Replication Crisis
xkcd.com/3117/
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Cory McCartan
11 months ago
I have a new R package, 'bases,' out on CRAN today! 'bases' provides a number of basis expansions that you can use inside any modeling formula. This means you can fit nonparametric regressions with lm() or glmnet() easily! Bases includes random Fourier features, approximate BART, and more!
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Melody Huang
Econometrica
about 1 year ago
We are pleased to announce an experiment intended to stimulate academic discussion and exchange, centered on papers published in Econometrica 1/5
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Andrew Heiss
about 1 year ago
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with
#rstats
and Observable and
#QuartoPub
!
stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
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Melody Huang
Nikhil Garg
about 1 year ago
*Please repost*
@sjgreenwood.bsky.social
and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for
#academicsky
. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience
bsky.app/profile/pape...
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Melody Huang
Khoa
about 1 year ago
Does drinking this much coffee lower the risk of omitted variable bias?
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I have a new working paper with Yi Zhang & Kosuke Imai on estimating generalizable heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs)! We account for distribution shifts in *both* individual covariates & treatment effect heterogeneity across different source sites. Details below--
arxiv.org/abs/2412.11136
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Minimax Regret Estimation for Generalizing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Multisite Data
To test scientific theories and develop individualized treatment rules, researchers often wish to learn heterogeneous treatment effects that can be consistently found across diverse populations and co...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11136
over 1 year ago
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Mellissa Meisels and I are hiring a Yale CSAP predoc for AY25-26. We're looking for someone with strong technical skills & interests in both methods and American politics. If you have any interested undergrads, please send this their way
tobin.yale.edu/opportunitie...
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CSAP Predoc: American Politics and Political Methodology
https://tobin.yale.edu/opportunities/csap-predoc-american-politics-and-political-methodology
over 1 year ago
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