Rarely Updated Blog

Better discrete choice modeling through the rank ordered logit

Or- a mathematically correct model of a psychologically coherent concept

discrete choice

Bayes

Jim Savage calls the MaxDiff model of discrete choice a “mathematically incorrect model of a psychologically incoherent concept”¹.

Who Forms Voting Habits?

Evidence from Florida

Causal Inference

This is a draft of a paper I wrote in grad school on whether formation of voting habits exhibits any heterogeneity by race, party, or gender…

My talk on Regularized Raking at NYOSPM

surveys

weighting

I recently gave a talk on Regularized Raking at the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup.

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Part 7- Putting it all together

MRP

Variational Inference

Note: Since writing this post, Pathfinder (described below as well in Section 5) has become available in CmdStan, which poses a problem for this concluding post to the series.

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Part 6- Diagnostics

MRP

Variational Inference

Diagnostics

This is section 6 in my series on using…

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Part 5- Normalizing Flows

MRP

Variational Inference

Normalizing Flows

This is section 5 in my series on using…

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Part 4- Importance Sampling

MRP

Variational Inference

This is section 4 in my series on using…

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Part 3- Alternatives to KL Divergence

MRP

Variational Inference

Note: I’ve gotten a lot more pessimistic about how generally useful the alternatives to simple KL-Divergence are on their own since writing this post. I still think these are…

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Part 2- The errors of our ways

MRP

Variational Inference

This is the second post in my series on using…

Variational Inference for MRP with Reliable Posterior Distributions

Introductions- things to do, places to be

MRP

BART

Variational Inference

This post introduces a series I intend to write, exploring using Variational Inference to massively speed up running complex survey estimation models like variants of Multilevel Regression and…

BART with varying intercepts in the MRP framework

From Old Website

MRP

BART

This is the first of a few posts about some of the substantive and modeling findings from my master’s thesis, where I use Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) and…

Convention Prediction with a Bayesian Hierarchical Multinomial Model

From Old Website

Stan

Here, I use a Bayesian hierarchical multinomial model to predict the first ballot results at the 2018 DFL (Democratic) State Convention, with data aggregated to the Party…

Is Voting Habit Forming? Replication, and additional robustness checks

From Old Website

causal inference

This post walks through my replication of the fuzzy regression discontinuity portion of Coppock and Green’s 2016 paper Is Voting Habit Forming?…

Type S/M errors in R with retrodesign()

From Old Website

This is a online version of the vignette for my r package retrodesign. It can be installed with:

Why the normal distribution?

From Old Website

When I was first studying probability theory as an undergrad, I had a bit of a conceptual hang-up with the Central Limit Theorem. Simulating it in R gave a nice visual of how each additional random variable smoothed out some of the original distribution’s individuality, and asymptotically we were left with a more…

Predicting race part 1- Bayes’ rule method and extensions

From Old Website

Race is a defining part of political identity in the United States, and so it should be no surprise that accurately modeling race can be beneficial for many political…