mastodon 4.6.9Using mathematical models to advance health equity and health justice. PhD Student in Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He/him ⧉ #rstats #CausalInference #SpatialStats #HealthJustice
I've been reading about missForest today
MissForest—non-parametric missing value imputation for mixed-type data
https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/28/1/112/219101
https://github.com/stekhoven/missForest
Runs much faster than `{mice}` in my experience, and I like the fewer parametric assumptions.
The above article on missForest is David Stekhoven and Peter Bühlmann's most cited article.
#DataScience #statistics #academia #econometrics #Epidemiology
Very proud to announce the first version of my new R package {nadir} was released today on CRAN!
Check it out --
https://ctesta01.github.io/nadir/
{nadir} is a package for super-learning, which is ensemble weighting candidate machine learners together according to their estimated cross-validated risk on held-out data.
#rstats #software #academia #DataScience #statistics #MachineLearning
Is anyone in the US CDC / NIH even working on the Ebola Bundibugyo strain now?
Over a year ago labs these were shuttered
https://www.wired.com/story/hhs-niaid-irf-ebola-disease-research-stop/
We are losing so many years of critical research on infectious diseases that could save countless lives
Some choice quotes on the topic of instrumental variables:
From Swanson and Hernán 2014
Imbens states we are “limited in the questions we can answer credibly and precisely.” We agree, but there are differences between the questions we can answer and the questions we want answered. Choosing only answerable questions (e.g., identifying the LATE in some settings) can mislead decision-making efforts: our estimates may be misinterpreted as directly relevant to a decision when in fact they are only tangentially related.
From Levis, Kennedy, and Keele 2024
Often in the literature, it is noted that the choice of estimand should be based on a scientific judgement and should reflect the specific research question. However, it is often the case that there is some interplay between the estimand and the plausibility of the identification assumptions. Nowhere is this more true than in an IV analysis.
What do you think? Do you have a favorite instrumental variable?
Tell me it's not rainfall!
I’d like to start a conversation about the #accessibility of math. Someday I aspire to be a professor, and I want to be inclusive to students of a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, but math (esp. advanced math) is full of details that make it very hard for anyone with dyslexia, dysgraphia, challenges with attention span, etc.
I know there’s some things I can do like providing notes / slides in advance so people don’t have to rely on my blackboard handwriting, and providing learning materials in multiple modalities, but what else is needed to make #math a more welcoming subject for students with what I think have traditionally been stigmatized as “learning difficulties”?
The world has spent a long time trying to force everyone to fit their expectations (“sit down, be quiet” ad nauseum) but I dream of a future where the classroom is more genuinely accepting and welcoming to people who experience the world differently than those who fit the mold we’re culturally conditioned to believe is “normal” or neurotypical.
Here’s a specific to get the conversation going: Is web-based math (MathJax / MathML) any better for screen readers than math PDFs? Do any screen readers even work with more advanced math at all??
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/trump-administration-freezes-2-2-billion-in-grants-to-harvard/
Today basically every faculty I ran into at the Harvard School of Public Health told me they had their grants cancelled — for work they do towards promoting health and saving lives.
I hope someday soon when you look at academic papers where the usual grant funding disclaimer would have been, that instead you will see “this paper was published in spite of the unlawful termination of grant XXXXXXX.”
I know funds being cut will slow down research and science in the US, but damn if this doesn’t make me want to dig in my heels and work harder for the things I believe in.
An enjoyable read I stumbled on
https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/epub-139.pdf
How solarpunk can help us
rewild our lives
Ana Sun and Susan Kaye Quinn
