[gov3009-l] GOV 3009 Applied Stats Workshop (10/09) - Max Goplerud

Dear Workshop Community, Our next meeting will be Wednesday October 9, where Max Goplerud will present his job market paper "Modelling Heterogeneity Using Bayesian Structured Sparsity”. Abstract: How to estimate heterogeneity, e.g. the effect of some variable differing across observations, is a key question in political science. Methods for doing so make simplifying assumptions about the underlying nature of the heterogeneity to draw reliable inferences. This paper allows a common way of simplifying complex phenomenon (placing observations with similar effects into discrete groups) to be integrated into regression analysis. The framework allows researchers to (i) use their prior knowledge to guide which groups are permissible and (ii) appropriately quantify uncertainty. The paper does this by translating work on "structured sparsity" from a penalized likelihood approach into a Bayesian prior and deriving theoretical results on posterior propriety and inference. It shows that this method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for estimating heterogeneous effects when the underlying heterogeneity is grouped and more effectively identifies groups of observations with different effects in observational data. A link to the paper can be found at j.mp/goplerud_sparsity <http://j.mp/goplerud_sparsity>. Where: CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354 (see this link <https://map.harvard.edu/?bld=04471&level=9> for directions). When: Wednesday, October 9 at 12 noon - 1:30 pm. All are welcome! Lunch will be provided. Best, Georgie