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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, defining the propensity score as the conditional probability of a unit (e.g., person, classroom, school) being assigned to the treatment, given a set of observed covariates. 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 ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), 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 statistical survey, surveys and experimental design, experiments. When census data (comprising every member of the target population) cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey sample (statistics), samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample ... [...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 b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Survey Methodology
Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey data collection, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. Survey methodology targets instruments or procedures that ask one or more questions that may or may not be answered. Researchers carry out statistical surveys with a view towards making statistical inferences about the population being studied; such inferences depend strongly on the survey questions used. Polls about public opinion, public-health surveys, market-research surveys, government surveys and censuses all exemplify quantitative research that uses survey methodology to answer questions about a population. Although censuses do not include a "sample", they do include other aspects of survey methodology, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Causal Inference
Causal inference is the process of determining the independent, actual effect of a particular phenomenon that is a component of a larger system. The main difference between causal inference and inference of association is that causal inference analyzes the response of an effect variable when a cause of the effect variable is changed. The study of why things occur is called '' etiology'', and can be described using the language of scientific causal notation. Causal inference is said to provide the evidence of causality theorized by causal reasoning. Causal inference is widely studied across all sciences. Several innovations in the development and implementation of methodology designed to determine causality have proliferated in recent decades. Causal inference remains especially difficult where experimentation is difficult or impossible, which is common throughout most sciences. The approaches to causal inference are broadly applicable across all types of scientific disciplines, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Indicator Function
In mathematics, an indicator function or a characteristic function of a subset of a set is a function that maps elements of the subset to one, and all other elements to zero. That is, if is a subset of some set , then the indicator function of is the function \mathbf_A defined by \mathbf_\!(x) = 1 if x \in A, and \mathbf_\!(x) = 0 otherwise. Other common notations are and \chi_A. The indicator function of is the Iverson bracket of the property of belonging to ; that is, \mathbf_(x) = \left x\in A\ \right For example, the Dirichlet function is the indicator function of the rational numbers as a subset of the real numbers. Definition Given an arbitrary set , the indicator function of a subset of is the function \mathbf_A \colon X \mapsto \ defined by \operatorname\mathbf_A\!( x ) = \begin 1 & \text x \in A \\ 0 & \text x \notin A \,. \end The Iverson bracket provides the equivalent notation \left x\in A\ \right/math> or that can be used instead of \mathbf_\ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Conditional Probability
In probability theory, conditional probability is a measure of the probability of an Event (probability theory), event occurring, given that another event (by assumption, presumption, assertion or evidence) is already known to have occurred. This particular method relies on event A occurring with some sort of relationship with another event B. In this situation, the event A can be analyzed by a conditional probability with respect to B. If the event of interest is and the event is known or assumed to have occurred, "the conditional probability of given ", or "the probability of under the condition ", is usually written as or occasionally . This can also be understood as the fraction of probability B that intersects with A, or the ratio of the probabilities of both events happening to the "given" one happening (how many times A occurs rather than not assuming B has occurred): P(A \mid B) = \frac. For example, the probability that any given person has a cough on any given day ma ... [...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 independence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Independent And Identically Distributed Random Variables
Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in Pennsylvania, United States * Independentes (English: Independents), a Portuguese artist group Music Groups, labels, and genres * Independent music, a number of genres associated with independent labels * Independent record label, a record label not associated with a major label * Independent Albums, American albums chart Albums * ''Independent'' (Ai album), 2012 * ''Independent'' (Faze album), 2006 * ''Independent'' (Sacred Reich album), 1993 Songs * "Independent" (song), a 2007 song by Webbie * "Independent", a 2002 song by Ayumi Hamasaki from '' H'' News media organizations * Independent Media Center (also known as Indymedia or IMC), an open publishing network of journalist collectives that report on political and social issues, e.g., in ''The Indypendent'' newspaper of NYC * ITV (TV network) (Independent Televi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Mahalanobis Distance
The Mahalanobis distance is a distance measure, measure of the distance between a point P and a probability distribution D, introduced by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, P. C. Mahalanobis in 1936. The mathematical details of Mahalanobis distance first appeared in the ''Journal of The Asiatic Society of Bengal'' in 1936. Mahalanobis's definition was prompted by the problem of similarity measure, identifying the similarities of skulls based on measurements (the earliest work related to similarities of skulls are from 1922 and another later work is from 1927). Raj Chandra Bose, R.C. Bose later obtained the sampling distribution of Mahalanobis distance, under the assumption of equal dispersion. It is a multivariate generalization of the square of the standard score z=(x- \mu)/\sigma: 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Epanechnikov Kernel
The term kernel is used in statistical analysis to refer to a window function. The term "kernel" has several distinct meanings in different branches of statistics. Bayesian statistics In statistics, especially in Bayesian statistics, the kernel of a probability density function (pdf) or probability mass function (pmf) is the form of the pdf or pmf in which any factors that are not functions of any of the variables in the domain are omitted. Note that such factors may well be functions of the parameters of the pdf or pmf. These factors form part of the normalization factor of the probability distribution, and are unnecessary in many situations. For example, in pseudo-random number sampling, most sampling algorithms ignore the normalization factor. In addition, in Bayesian analysis of conjugate prior distributions, the normalization factors are generally ignored during the calculations, and only the kernel considered. At the end, the form of the kernel is examined, and if it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Kernel (statistics)
The term kernel is used in statistics, statistical analysis to refer to a window function. The term "kernel" has several distinct meanings in different branches of statistics. Bayesian statistics In statistics, especially in Bayesian statistics, the kernel of a probability density function (pdf) or probability mass function (pmf) is the form of the pdf or pmf in which any factors that are not functions of any of the variables in the domain are omitted. Note that such factors may well be functions of the parameters of the pdf or pmf. These factors form part of the normalization factor of the probability distribution, and are unnecessary in many situations. For example, in pseudo-random number sampling, most sampling algorithms ignore the normalization factor. In addition, in Bayesian analysis of conjugate prior distributions, the normalization factors are generally ignored during the calculations, and only the kernel considered. At the end, the form of the kernel is examined, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |