STATS 319: Literature of Statistics

Course Info

• Professor: Dennis Sun (dlsun@stanford)
  • Office: Sequoia 124
  • Office Hours: Tuesdays 3:30 - 4:30 PM
• Meetings: Wed 3 - 4:20 PM in Econ 139
• Course Website: stats319.stanford.edu

Course Description

STATS 319 is designed to give Statistics Ph.D. students practice in reading academic papers and delivering presentations.

This quarter, the theme is "Controversies in Statistics". We will examine controversies, past and present, in the theory and application of statistics. The goal of this course is to help you understand the intellectual tradition and community of which you are now a part. Knowledge of material in STATS 300A is necessary for this class.

For some of the topics, there is the potential to produce an original synthesis of the literature. For example, the historical topics could make for a nice paper in the "History Corner" of The American Statistician. Please talk to me if you are interested.

General Reading

Required

Reading these articles is essential if you want to follow the discussions this quarter. You should be familiar with most of the ideas from STATS 300A, so feel free to skim.

• Efron, Bradley. "Controversies in the Foundations of Statistics." The American Mathematical Monthly 85, no. 4 (1978): 231–46.
• Robins, James, and Larry Wasserman. "Conditioning, likelihood, and coherence: A review of some foundational concepts." Journal of the American Statistical Association 95, no. 452 (2000): 1340-1346.

Optional

• Lehmann, Erich L. Fisher, Neyman, and the creation of classical statistics. Springer, 2011.

Tips on Presentations

• Patrick Winston How to Speak

Topics

You are expected to read multiple papers representing different sides of each controversy, explain each side's argument, and take a side. For some of the controversies, I only provided one survey paper, so you need to seek out the references and read some of those papers.

Week	Topic	Presenter	Papers
1	Fisher/Pearson Chi-Square Controversy	Dennis Sun	Baird, Davis. "The Fisher/Pearson Chi-Squared Controversy: A Turning Point for Inductive Inference.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34, no. 2 (1983): 105–18. Stigler, Stephen M. "Karl Pearson’s theoretical errors and the advances they inspired." (2008): 261-271.
2	Thinking about Your Career	Dennis Sun	Greg Duncan and Guy Lebanon. Academic Careers vs. Industry Careers. Sean Carroll. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University. Radhika Nagpal. The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life.
3	Rubin/Pearl Approaches to Causal Inference	Xavier Gonzalez	Imbens, G. W. (2020). Potential outcome and directed acyclic graph approaches to causality: Relevance for empirical practice in economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 58(4), 1129-1179. Pearl, J. (2009). Causal inference in statistics: An overview. Statistics Surveys, 3, 96 - 146.
4	Berkeley/Stanford Joint Colloquium (at Berkeley)	Tselil Schramm
5	Breiman's Two Cultures	Debolina Paul	Breiman, L. (2001). Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (with discussion). Statistical Science, 16(3), 199-231. Special issue of Observational Studies with 28 comments on Breiman's paper.
6	Conditional Inference	Anav Sood	Ghosh, M., N. Reid, and D. A. S. Fraser. "Ancillary Statistics: A Review." Statistica Sinica 20, no. 4 (2010): 1309–32.
7	Frequentist vs. Bayes	Sophia Lu	Lindley, Dennis V. "A statistical paradox." Biometrika 44, no. 1/2 (1957): 187-192. Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan, Michael Lee, Tom Lodewyckx, and Geoffrey J. Iverson. "Bayesian versus frequentist inference." Bayesian evaluation of informative hypotheses (2008): 181-207. Efron, Bradley. "The Future of Indirect Evidence." Statistical Science 25, no. 2 (2010): 145-157. (Be sure to read the comments by Greenland, Gelman, and Kass.
8	Fiducial Inference	Tim Sudijono	Zabell, Sandy L. "RA Fisher and fiducial argument." Statistical Science (1992): 369-387.
9	Ecological Inference	John Cherian	King, Gary. A solution to the ecological inference problem: Reconstructing individual behavior from aggregate data. Princeton University Press, 1997. (This is the book that started the controversy. You don't need to read it; you can infer its argument from the other readings.) Freedman, David A., Stephen P. Klein, Michael Ostland, and Michael R. Roberts. "Review: A solution to the ecological inference problem." Journal of the American Statistical Association 93, no. 444 (1998): 1518-1522. King, Gary. "The future of ecological inference research: a comment on Freedman et al." Journal of the American Statistical Association 94, no. 445 (1999): 352-355. Freedman, David A. "Ecological inference and the ecological fallacy." International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences 6, no. 4027-4030 (1999): 1-7.
10	Simulation-Based Inference for Teaching Statistics	Will Hartog	Cobb, G. W. (2007). The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum? Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, 1(1). Hesterberg, T. C. (2015). What Teachers Should Know About the Bootstrap: Resampling in the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum. The American Statistician, 69(4), 371-386. Hayden, R. W. (2019). Questionable Claims for Simple Versions of the Bootstrap. Journal of Statistics Education, 27(3), 208-215.

Other Topics

Week	Topic	Presenter	Papers
	Neyman/Fisher Controversy		Sabbaghi, Arman, and Donald B. Rubin. "Comments on the Neyman–Fisher controversy and its consequences." Statistical Science 29, no. 2 (2014): 267-284. Lehmann, Erich L. "The Fisher, Neyman-Pearson theories of testing hypotheses: one theory or two?." Journal of the American statistical Association 88, no. 424 (1993): 1242-1249.
	Countable vs. Finite Additivity		Williamson, Jon. "Countable Additivity and Subjective Probability." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50, no. 3 (1999): 401–16.
	Likelihood Principle		Birnbaum, Allan. "On the Foundations of Statistical Inference." Journal of the American Statistical Association 57, no. 298 (1962): 269–306. Mayo, Deborah G. "On the Birnbaum argument for the strong likelihood principle." Statistical Science 29, no. 2 (2014): 227-239.
	The Bible Code		Witztum, Doron, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg. "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis." Statistical Science 9, no. 3 (1994): 429–38. McKay, Brendan, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai. "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle." Statistical Science 14, no. 2 (1999): 150–73.
	P-Values		American Statistical Association's Statement on p-values (be sure to look at the supplemental materials) Special issue of The American Statistician: Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond p < 0.05

If you would prefer to do your talk on a different controversy in statistics, please come talk to me.

Grading

This class is graded S/NC. To earn a Satisfactory grade, the following are required:

• Give a 50-minute presentation on one of the topics.
• Attend all of the class sessions and participate in the discussions.
• For two presentations, write an e-mail with 1-2 paragraphs to the presenter with peer feedback. Please CC Dennis so that you can get credit.

Note that the class session in Week 4 (April 26) coincides with the Berkeley/Stanford Joint Colloquium, so class is canceled. You should attend the colloquium instead.