Speaker: Bharat N. Anand, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning at Harvard University and the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School
Title: “The Future of Education: Reflections from the Front Lines”
Abstract: In this talk I will offer a perspective on how, and why, digital technologies have shaped pedagogy and the practice of teaching over the last decade at Harvard, and what this means for the future. Specifically, I will examine: Where...
Please join us for our upcoming Statistics Seminar on May 19th with Art B. Owen who is a Max H. Stein Professor of Statistics at Stanford University.
Title: Tie-Breaker Designs
Abstract: Companies may offer incentives to their best customers and philanthropists may offer scholarships to the strongest students. They can evaluate the impact of these treatments later using a regression discontinuity analysis. Unfortunately, regression discontinuity analyses have high variance....
Abstract: Model-X knockoffs is a wrapper that transforms essentially any feature importance measure into a variable selection algorithm, which discovers true effects while rigorously controlling the expected fraction of false positives. A frequently discussed challenge to apply this method is to construct knockoff variables, which are synthetic variables obeying a crucial exchangeability property with the explanatory variables under study. This paper introduces techniques for knockoff generation in great...
Title: Recent developments on unbiased Monte Carlo methods
Abstract: Monte Carlo estimators, based on Markov chains or interacting particle systems, are typically biased when run with a finite number of iterations (or a finite number of particles). Although this is usually considered unavoidable, and negligible in the usual asymptotic sense, it is an important obstacle on the path towards scalable numerical integration on large-scale distributed computing systems. In a series of works that build on the seminal paper of Glynn and Rhee (2014), a...
Title: Aggregators, Social Media, and News Consumption
Abstract: In a series of studies, we explore the ways in which aggregators and intermediaries affect the consumption of news on the internet. We analyze several natural experiments involving the Google News aggregator, showing that Google News redistributes news consumption away from large outlets and towards small outlets, and decreases user loyalty to their favorite outlets. We find evidence that Google News increases overall news consumption, consistent with the theory that it reduces search costs and helps users discover stories and... Read more about HBSDigitalSem: Susan Athey
