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Propensity Score Matching
In the statistical analysis of observational data, propensity score matching (PSM) is a statistical matching technique that attempts to estimate the effect of a treatment, policy, or other intervention by accounting for the covariates that predict receiving the treatment. PSM attempts to reduce the bias due to confounding variables that could be found in an estimate of the treatment effect obtained from simply comparing outcomes among units that received the treatment versus those that did not. Paul R. Rosenbaum and Donald Rubin introduced the technique in 1983. The possibility of bias arises because a difference in the treatment outcome (such as the average treatment effect) between treated and untreated groups may be caused by a factor that predicts treatment rather than the treatment itself. In randomized experiments, the randomization enables unbiased estimation of treatment effects; for each covariate, randomization implies that treatment-groups will be balanced on ave ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Statistics
Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.Dodge, Y. (2006) ''The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms'', Oxford University Press. When census data cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample to the population as a whole. An ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Non-experimental
In fields such as epidemiology, social sciences, psychology and statistics, an observational study draws inferences from a sample to a population where the independent variable is not under the control of the researcher because of ethical concerns or logistical constraints. One common observational study is about the possible effect of a treatment on subjects, where the assignment of subjects into a treated group versus a control group is outside the control of the investigator. This is in contrast with experiments, such as randomized controlled trials, where each subject is randomly assigned to a treated group or a control group. Observational studies, for lacking an assignment mechanism, naturally present difficulties for inferential analysis. Motivation The independent variable may be beyond the control of the investigator for a variety of reasons: * A randomized experiment would violate ethical standards. Suppose one wanted to investigate the abortion – breast cancer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Statistical Independence
Independence is a fundamental notion in probability theory, as in statistics and the theory of stochastic processes. Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if, informally speaking, the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other or, equivalently, does not affect the odds. Similarly, two random variables are independent if the realization of one does not affect the probability distribution of the other. When dealing with collections of more than two events, two notions of independence need to be distinguished. The events are called pairwise independent if any two events in the collection are independent of each other, while mutual independence (or collective independence) of events means, informally speaking, that each event is independent of any combination of other events in the collection. A similar notion exists for collections of random variables. Mutual independence implies pairwise independenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Independent And Identically Distributed Random Variables
In probability theory and statistics, a collection of random variables is independent and identically distributed if each random variable has the same probability distribution as the others and all are mutually independent. This property is usually abbreviated as ''i.i.d.'', ''iid'', or ''IID''. IID was first defined in statistics and finds application in different fields such as data mining and signal processing. Introduction In statistics, we commonly deal with random samples. A random sample can be thought of as a set of objects that are chosen randomly. Or, more formally, it’s “a sequence of independent, identically distributed (IID) random variables”. In other words, the terms ''random sample'' and ''IID'' are basically one and the same. In statistics, we usually say “random sample,” but in probability it’s more common to say “IID.” * Identically Distributed means that there are no overall trends–the distribution doesn’t fluctuate and all items in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Stratified Sampling
In statistics, stratified sampling is a method of sampling from a population which can be partitioned into subpopulations. In statistical surveys, when subpopulations within an overall population vary, it could be advantageous to sample each subpopulation (stratum) independently. Stratification is the process of dividing members of the population into homogeneous subgroups before sampling. The strata should define a partition of the population. That is, it should be '' collectively exhaustive'' and '' mutually exclusive'': every element in the population must be assigned to one and only one stratum. Then simple random sampling is applied within each stratum. The objective is to improve the precision of the sample by reducing sampling error. It can produce a weighted mean that has less variability than the arithmetic mean of a simple random sample of the population. In computational statistics, stratified sampling is a method of variance reduction when Monte Carlo metho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Mahalanobis Distance
The Mahalanobis distance is a measure of the distance between a point ''P'' and a distribution ''D'', introduced by P. C. Mahalanobis in 1936. Mahalanobis's definition was prompted by the problem of identifying the similarities of skulls based on measurements in 1927. It is a multi-dimensional generalization of the idea of measuring how many standard deviations away ''P'' is from the mean of ''D''. This distance is zero for ''P'' at the mean of ''D'' and grows as ''P'' moves away from the mean along each principal component axis. If each of these axes is re-scaled to have unit variance, then the Mahalanobis distance corresponds to standard Euclidean distance in the transformed space. The Mahalanobis distance is thus unitless, scale-invariant, and takes into account the correlations of the data set. Definition Given a probability distribution Q on \R^N, with mean \vec = (\mu_1, \mu_2, \mu_3, \dots , \mu_N)^\mathsf and positive-definite covariance matrix S, the Mahalanobis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Nearest Neighbor Search
Nearest neighbor search (NNS), as a form of proximity search, is the optimization problem of finding the point in a given set that is closest (or most similar) to a given point. Closeness is typically expressed in terms of a dissimilarity function: the less similar the objects, the larger the function values. Formally, the nearest-neighbor (NN) search problem is defined as follows: given a set ''S'' of points in a space ''M'' and a query point ''q'' ∈ ''M'', find the closest point in ''S'' to ''q''. Donald Knuth in vol. 3 of ''The Art of Computer Programming'' (1973) called it the post-office problem, referring to an application of assigning to a residence the nearest post office. A direct generalization of this problem is a ''k''-NN search, where we need to find the ''k'' closest points. Most commonly ''M'' is a metric space and dissimilarity is expressed as a distance metric, which is symmetric and satisfies the triangle inequality. Even more common, ''M'' is taken ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Estimator
In statistics, an estimator is a rule for calculating an estimate of a given quantity based on observed data: thus the rule (the estimator), the quantity of interest (the estimand) and its result (the estimate) are distinguished. For example, the sample mean is a commonly used estimator of the population mean. There are point and interval estimators. The point estimators yield single-valued results. This is in contrast to an interval estimator, where the result would be a range of plausible values. "Single value" does not necessarily mean "single number", but includes vector valued or function valued estimators. ''Estimation theory'' is concerned with the properties of estimators; that is, with defining properties that can be used to compare different estimators (different rules for creating estimates) for the same quantity, based on the same data. Such properties can be used to determine the best rules to use under given circumstances. However, in robust statistics, statistic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Covariance
In probability theory and statistics, covariance is a measure of the joint variability of two random variables. If the greater values of one variable mainly correspond with the greater values of the other variable, and the same holds for the lesser values (that is, the variables tend to show similar behavior), the covariance is positive. In the opposite case, when the greater values of one variable mainly correspond to the lesser values of the other, (that is, the variables tend to show opposite behavior), the covariance is negative. The sign of the covariance therefore shows the tendency in the linear relationship between the variables. The magnitude of the covariance is not easy to interpret because it is not normalized and hence depends on the magnitudes of the variables. The normalized version of the covariance, the correlation coefficient, however, shows by its magnitude the strength of the linear relation. A distinction must be made between (1) the covariance of two ran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Impact Evaluation
Impact evaluation assesses the changes that can be attributed to a particular intervention, such as a project, program or policy, both the intended ones, as well as ideally the unintended ones. In contrast to outcome monitoring, which examines whether targets have been achieved, impact evaluation is structured to answer the question: how would outcomes such as participants' well-being have changed if the intervention had not been undertaken? This involves counterfactual analysis, that is, "a comparison between what actually happened and what would have happened in the absence of the intervention." Impact evaluations seek to answer cause-and-effect questions. In other words, they look for the changes in outcome that are directly attributable to a program. Impact evaluation helps people answer key questions for evidence-based policy making: what works, what doesn't, where, why and for how much? It has received increasing attention in policy making in recent years in the context of bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Logistic Regression
In statistics, the logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the probability of an event taking place by having the log-odds for the event be a linear function (calculus), linear combination of one or more independent variables. In regression analysis, logistic regression (or logit regression) is estimation theory, estimating the parameters of a logistic model (the coefficients in the linear combination). Formally, in binary logistic regression there is a single binary variable, binary dependent variable, coded by an indicator variable, where the two values are labeled "0" and "1", while the independent variables can each be a binary variable (two classes, coded by an indicator variable) or a continuous variable (any real value). The corresponding probability of the value labeled "1" can vary between 0 (certainly the value "0") and 1 (certainly the value "1"), hence the labeling; the function that converts log-odds to probability is the logistic function, h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_-_Galton_1889_diagram.png "Click for more on -> Regression Toward The Mean") |
Regression Toward The Mean
In statistics, regression toward the mean (also called reversion to the mean, and reversion to mediocrity) is the fact that if one sample of a random variable is extreme, the next sampling of the same random variable is likely to be closer to its mean. Furthermore, when many random variables are sampled and the most extreme results are intentionally picked out, it refers to the fact that (in many cases) a second sampling of these picked-out variables will result in "less extreme" results, closer to the initial mean of all of the variables. Mathematically, the strength of this "regression" effect is dependent on whether or not all of the random variables are drawn from the same distribution, or if there are genuine differences in the underlying distributions for each random variable. In the first case, the "regression" effect is statistically likely to occur, but in the second case, it may occur less strongly or not at all. Regression toward the mean is thus a useful concept to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |