Survey Statistics: continued struggles with equivalent weights statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/04/s...

blog post: Blue Rose Research is hiring ! We are looking for a teammate with expertise in both LLM tools and statistical modeling. Someone who clearly communicates assumptions, results, and uncertainty. With care and kindness.

blog post: individualism doesn't work typical machine learning loss looks at one individual at a time but for MRP, we care about aggregates

blog post: MRPW you've got a survey collected by someone else, and they gave you weights. how can you use those weights in the MRP (Multilevel Regression and Poststratification) ?

blog post: struggles with equivalent weights you've done MRP. someone asks you for survey weights. how to get them ?

blog post: beyond balancing in midterms, voters tend to support the out party for balance do polls still help predict midterms ? yes

The ultimate New York City lover’s treasure hunt is back Friday, Oct. 17 through Sunday, Oct. 19: bit.ly/3IHnHwn

blog post: Fat Bear Week Basu's Bears is a lesson in: 1) using auxiliary information (pre-salmon-feasting weights) 2) how bad an unbiased estimator can be statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/23/s...

blog post: random sampling is not leaving we turned to response instrument Z because random sampling is "dead" but does this method still rely on starting with random sampling ?

blog post: random sampling is not leaving we turned to response instrument Z because random sampling is "dead" but does this method still rely on starting with random sampling ?

blog post on imputation (again): we want E[Y|X] but X can be missing @lucystats.bsky.social @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social @glenmartin.bsky.social @maartenvsmeden.bsky.social et al. say: random imputation should use Y deterministic imputation shouldn't statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/09/s...

I learn from every interaction with Maria. I attended a talk of hers yesterday. I highly recommend reading her work.

blog post: connections between survey statistics and experimental design. split-plot designs are analogous to cluster sampling. blocking is analogous to stratification. featuring an experiment by Arjun Potter and colleagues at NM-AIST !

blog post: Thomas Lumley writes about Interviewing your Laptop what are the problems with using LLMs as survey respondents ? how are these similar to problems with poststratification ? CC @tslumley.bsky.social

Now with 'nearly isotonic' ... github.com/finite-sampl... cc @shiraamitchell.bsky.social

We are hiring ! Data Scientist – Analytics: job-boards.greenhouse.io/blueroserese... and Research Analyst: job-boards.greenhouse.io/blueroserese...

Survey Statistics: answers from the BLS statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/19/s...

Following @shiraamitchell.bsky.social's post on problems with multiclass calibration: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/12/s... see a proposal for a solution + related package (v0)

🤖 But wait! There's more! You can check out @shiraamitchell.bsky.social 's most recent update on the details of Calibration, posted yesterday! statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/12/s...

🤖 Ever been a bit confused abt calibration in statistical modelling? My friend @shiraamitchell.bsky.social has got you covered!! She works on survey statistics for Things That Matter--like elections--and has kindly taken the time to explain some things! statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/03/s...

Survey Statistics: 2nd helpings of the 2nd flavor of calibration statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/12/s...

blog post: 2nd helpings of the 2nd flavor of calibration 🍨🍨 in political surveys, we "logit shift" predictions to match known aggregates (e.g. total Democratic votes). but what happens for multinomial outcomes ? a fun excuse to review IPF/raking 🍂 statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/12/s...

Official statistics As you may have heard, President Trump has dismissed the head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that payroll employment figures presented by the BLS were faked to make him look bad. Politicians meddling with official statistics is a bad idea.  This isn't because…

blog post: BLS Jobs Report let's learn about the CES employer survey that produces the jobs count. late reporting (a form of nonresponse) results in revisions. my first (naive !) question: why use employment size in stratification but not nonresponse adjustment ?

Already having minor FOMO over skipping #JSM2025. Survey Research Methods folks there, please post!

blog post: adjusting for interest in politics whether you respond to a survey (R) may depend on outcome (Y), even after controlling for covariates (X) what if we can expand this set of X to include interest in politics ?

very excited to teach again soon at NM-AIST

blog post: a new paradigm for polling so far we assumed response R is independent of outcome Y **within X** but if R can depend on Y, what to do ? one idea: use a response instrument Z statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/07/22/s...

blog post about longitudinal/panel data: panel data includes repeated surveys of the same people over time. this structure can be incorporated into models using person-level effects. but misspecifying the person-level effects distribution can cause bias.

Did you hear that I'll be teaching four brand new remote courses this year covering Bayesian mixture modeling, survival modeling, pairwise comparison modeling, and ordinal modeling, www.eventzilla.net/e/advanced-b...? Reskeets and sharing with your friends and colleges appreciated!

blog post about imputation: With nonresponse worsening, we want to adjust for a lot of covariates. This often means handling many missing covariates. In theory, fit one big model for everything. But how can practitioners handle this ?

*really* excited for this ! love the name: Structural Zero. Alan Agresti's Categorical Data Analysis book offers a good explanation (which I'm sure the amazing authors at @hrdag.org will get into):

blog post about Sparsified MRP: With nonresponse worsening, we want to adjust for a lot of covariates. Estimates from such big models will be unstable without a lot of data and/or regularization. Have you seen MRP with sparsifying priors ? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/07/01/s...

blog post about poststratification: which estimate is best ? 1. unadjusted sample mean 2. classical poststratification 3. regularized poststratification (e.g. MRP) statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/24/s...

A new revised version of "Uncertainty in Bayesian leave-one-out cross-validation based model comparison" with Sivula, @mansmag.bsky.social, and Matamoros. We have clarified the goal of the paper, made more clear that the uncertainty is described by the posterior of unknown elpd difference, 1/4

folks like @rnishimura.bsky.social and @tslumley.bsky.social make survey statistics so fun 😊🙏🏻

blog post about 3 flavors of survey weights: 1. ‘Inverse probability of response weights’ 1/E[R|X] 2. ‘Equivalent weights’ based on model for outcome of interest Y 3. ‘Calibration weights’ to match known population totals of X

blog post about Kish's and Xiao-Li Meng's design effect: error increases with population size (!!) and correlation between inclusion in the sample and the quantity of interest

blog post about 2 flavors of calibration in survey statistics: 1. post-stratification ("MRP") 2. intercept correction ("logit-shifting") Includes a rough summary of @shirokuriwaki.bsky.social et al.'s "The Geography of Racially Polarized Voting: Calibrating Surveys at the District Level".

new blog series about Survey Statistics

Excited to signal boost @shiraamitchell.bsky.social and @ccgilroy.bsky.social 's response to the @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social and Caroline Soler's critiques of our estimates of Harris support among non-voters and youth voters. Our main points:

New post: "Struggles with surveying nonvoters and young voters" statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/16/s...

more here on @statmodeling.bsky.social blog: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/10/b...

Looking forward to reading ! Really enjoyed talking to @adamjkucharski.bsky.social while he worked on this.

Excited to join @ezraklein to talk through what happened in 2024. There's a turnout story this cycle, but not the one we're used to talking about. With less-engaged and less-likely voters becoming more Republican, a larger turnout meant a more GOP electorate.

Come work with us!

thinking about the next election ? come work with us ! we're hiring for an AI-focused machine learning engineer role at Blue Rose Research. job-boards.greenhouse.io/blueroserese...

Last days for submitting to #UAI2025! The deadline is Feb 10 23:59 AoE 💥 We welcome papers in #uncertainty #AI #ML #causality #CausalSky #statML #probabilisticmodels #reasoning #impreciseprobabilities #neurosymbolic and other topics

In my latest @npr.org story, officials and data users warn that the reliability of the U.S. government statistics used to track the country’s economy and population is under threat because of budget concerns. That's before any new funding cuts by President Trump and Congress.

As always my unbounded thanks to everyone supporting this work financially on patreon dot com, www.patreon.com/betanalpha.  If you have the financial means (that’s an expectation value joke, you see) and my writing has helped your own work then consider supporting.