FINAL REMINDER --- Applied Statistics Workshop TOMORROW (10/3) at 12 noon
Lunch provided --- All are welcome
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We will convene for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) next week on Wednesday (10/3).
The speaker is
Naoki Egami (Princeton), who will be presenting
his paper "Causal Diffusion Analysis with Stationarity: How Hate Crimes Diffuse across Space" (
paper link here).
Where: CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354 (see
this link for directions).
When: Wednesday, October 3rd at 12 noon - 1:30 pm.
Abstract: Although social scientists have long been interested in the process
through which ideas and behavior diffuse, the identification of causal
diffusion effects, also known as peer effects, remains challenging. Many
scholars consider the commonly used assumption of no omitted
confounders to be untenable due to contextual confounding and homophily
bias. To address this long-standing identification problem, I introduce a
class of stationary causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs),
which represent the time-invariant nonparametric causal structure. I
first show that this stationary causal DAG implies a new statistical
test that can detect a wide range of biases, including the two types
mentioned above. The proposed test allows researchers to empirically
assess the contentious assumption of no omitted confounders. In
addition, I develop a difference-in-difference style estimator that can
directly correct biases under an additional parametric assumption.
Leveraging the proposed methods, I study the spatial diffusion of hate
crimes in Germany. After correcting large upward bias in existing
studies, I find hate crimes diffuse only to areas that have a high
proportion of school dropouts. To highlight the general applicability of
the proposed approach, I also analyze the network diffusion of human
rights norms. The proposed methodology is implemented in a forthcoming
open source software package.
All are welcome! Lunch is provided!
Best,
Connor Jerzak
Applied Statistics Workshop -- Graduate Student Coordinator