statistics

Crunching numbers isn’t enough; you also have to explain results

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 15:31:59 +0000

Crunching numbers isn’t enough; you also have to explain results Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/19/2023 - 08:31

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder researcher Eric Vance recently won the W.J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting, in recognition of his work to help statisticians and data scientists become better communicators

The skills of statistics and data science are broad and varied, requiring those who use them not only to ask the right questions and capture the right data, but to process and analyze it and then convey what they discovered.

�鶹��Ժ of statistics and data science are taught methods and modeling, they’re taught to code and to troubleshoot, “but how do we teach students in statistics and data science to become more effective collaborators?” asks Eric Vance, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of applied mathematics.

“The thing about modern statistics is that almost anybody can upload an Excel spreadsheet to a statistical software program, do some stuff and get answers. You can have people who understand data, who understand methods and the appropriate conditions to use those methods. But what we want is to grow the number of well-trained data scientists who understand that the context of data matters and who also have that drive to see their work put into action for the benefit of society and know how to collaborate to make that happen.”

Eric Vance (center), a CU Boulder associate professor of applied mathematics, is a Fulbright fellow in Indonesia for the 2023-24 academic year. He’s working with colleagues at IPB University to develop a course in effective statistics and data science collaboration

For most of his career, Vance has recognized that it’s not enough to be good at statistics and data science—students entering these fields must also learn communication and project-management skills to become effective collaborators. He has designed curricula and academic programs that promote this goal, work that recently was recognized with the American Statistical Association’s W.J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting.

The award recognizes individuals who have “demonstrated excellence in statistical consulting or developed and contributed new methods, software or ways of thinking that improve statistical practice in general.”

As the youngest winner by at least 15 years, Vance is in the middle rather than at the close of his career, “which is good because there’s still a lot I want to do to translate my framework for collaboration into different languages and cultures, and to build it up across disciplines.”

Doing good with data

Since the beginning of Vance’s academic career, which started as director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis at Virginia Tech, “I noticed that my students were really good in statistical methods, but only some of them were really good in the non-technical skills, the communication skills,” he says.

“Part of my job was also to teach statistical consulting, so I started to think about what are the key aspects that a student needs to know, that a student can learn to become an effective, collaborative statistician?”

Good data scientists have a deep store of quantitative skills, he says, and many enter the field because they want to work with real data and pursue projects that help society and benefit humanity. Plus, in this hyper-plugged-in world, data are everywhere—powerful data in huge datasets with the potential to have sweeping effects. The demand for people who can analyze data properly and leverage them appropriately is growing.

“But what I noticed is kind of holding statisticians and scientists back is not technical skills—it’s not that they don’t know the latest analysis technique—but it’s that they don’t have the communication skills,” Vance says. “That became my focus: What is it that a student or a data scientist needs to know to effectively unlock the technical skills to do the most good?”

At CU Boulder, Vance established and directs the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA), housed in the Department of Applied Mathematics, to teach students “to become effective interdisciplinary collaborators who can apply statistical analysis and data science to enable and accelerate research on campus and making data-driven business decisions and policy interventions in the community.”

Vance explains that often statisticians and data scientists are not the ones collecting the data they analyze, so “if we want to develop new methods, we need to have data, and who has data? Everybody else. Domain experts are everywhere around world, so statistics and data science should be collaborative disciplines, and students should learn to work with a chemist or a biologist or an English professor or an elected official to help them think about what kind of data they have, help them collect high-quality data and transform into policy and action.”

More than just good with data

Vance and his colleagues have built LISA into the center of the global LISA 2020 Global Network of statics labs that aim to strengthen local capacity in statistical analysis and data science and to transform academic evidence into action for development.

You can’t just be good with data anymore; you have to be able to communicate why it matters.”

The LISA 2020 Global Network comprises 35 statistics labs in 10 countries, including Nigeria, Brazil and Pakistan. Vance is now a Fulbright fellow in Indonesia, where he’s working with colleagues at IPB University to develop a course in effective statistics and data science collaboration and establish a new statistics and data science collaboration center.

Several years ago, Vance and research colleague Heather Smith developed the ASCCR framework—which stands for attitude, structure, content, communication and relationship—to support this model of statistics and data science education that incorporates collaboration skills. Vance’s work in Indonesia is also exploring how to adapt ASCCR within different cultural contexts.

“We want statistics and data science students around the world to have the skills to collaborate and communicate with domain experts,” Vance says. “Maybe it’s a researcher around campus, maybe a local policy maker, maybe a local businessperson—anybody who has data and wants to be able to do something with the data, make a decision based on the data or come to some conclusion.

“We want students to become people who can talk with a domain expert to understand what the problem is, what the data are, how they were collected, the provenance of the data, and then figure out what that the domain expert actually wants to do with the data. That means understanding the workflow of collaboration before actually analyzing the data and coming up with some statistical results. Then they need to translate those results to answer the original research question or come up with a conclusion and recommendations for action. You can’t just be good with data anymore; you have to be able to communicate why it matters.”

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A CU statistician’s global mission help students tackle real-world problems

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 22:51:21 +0000

A CU statistician’s global mission help students tackle real-world problems Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/06/2023 - 16:51

Jaxon Parker

Fulbright project to launch a new statistics course in Indonesia to provide interdisciplinary training and help students make data-driven decisions in everyday life

Data is an increasingly important facet of today’s interconnected world, but not every country can employ data for the benefit of its communities. A mathematician’s Fulbright Scholar project will create a new course in Indonesia designed to train students to solve local issues with data.

Eric Vance, an associate professor in applied mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA), which trains students in data science through collaborations with researchers, policymakers and business owners.

For the past 13 years, Eric Vance has been the director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA), first at Virginia Tech, and now, at the University of Colorado Boulder. In his work with LISA, Eric trains statisticians and data scientists to move between theory and practice.

“Being able to understand and reason with statistics, such as to debunk misinformation, is necessary to be a responsible citizen,” Vance says. “Because so many researchers, policymakers and businesses use data, they need to collaborate with statisticians so they can make good decisions and get the most out of their data.”

Vance has worked on and supervised numerous interdisciplinary projects using data at CU Boulder, such as a data humanities class, a study linking cardiovascular disease and hearing loss and a digital map of precolonial Africa.

But Vance also has worked on a global vision of data analysis and interdisciplinary training through LISA 2020, a network of 35 “stat labs,” or statistics and data science collaboration laboratories that span across Africa, South America and South Asia.

“I saw this model where my students were getting great experience working on real projects, and the researchers and policymakers they were working with benefited tremendously. We were seeing positive impacts for society,” Vance says. “I realized that this was a fantastic model that was not just relevant in the United States, but it was relevant worldwide and especially in developing countries.”

Now, Vance has set his sights on a new stat lab being developed by IPB University in Indonesia, where he plans on living with his family for a year while on sabbatical. His work there is supported by the Fulbright Scholars Program, the U.S. government’s flagship program of international educational and cultural exchange.

“IPB is the premier statistics and data science program in Indonesia,” Vance says. “They were really keen on implementing this vision of a stat lab to both educate their students in real applications of data science and enable research and responsible data-driven decisions in their community.”

Each of the stat labs in the LISA 2020 network are individually run, but they share a core framework that emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration. With a Fulbright award, Vance intends to study the growth of IPB’s stat lab and share its projects’ outcomes with the world.

“I’m excited to be able to witness and document the birth of a new stat lab,” Vance says. “I’m very curious as to what are the universal aspects of this teaching method and what are the aspects that are dependent on cultural and national contexts.”

Although Vance will not directly lead or teach IPB’s stat lab, he will regularly meet with and advise both faculty and students over the lab’s first year to see how his ideas of teaching collaborative data science will be put into practice.

�鶹��Ժ are going to be exposed to a variety of problems and see how statistics and data science are applied in lots of different projects beyond the ones that they are personally involved with. They may work with a biology student one month and then the next be working with a local government official who is trying to best allocate their budget.”

“�鶹��Ժ are going to be exposed to a variety of problems and see how statistics and data science are applied in lots of different projects beyond the ones that they are personally involved with,” Vance says. “They may work with a biology student one month and then the next be working with a local government official who is trying to best allocate their budget.”

Through his observation, Vance also hopes to learn new ideas from IPB’s emergent collaborative laboratory.

“By translating what I know from the U.S. into Indonesian culture, I’m going to learn more about what will work in the U.S.,” Vance says.

Vance’s research on IPB’s stat lab will be conducted from September to May 2024, which will likely be submitted to Statistics Education Research Journal.

Along with working to understand the stat lab’s development and the challenges it may face, Vance also looks forward to experiencing life in a new country with his family.

“It will be a challenge to move my whole family to Indonesia for a year,” Vance says. He has a 3-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter with his wife, Marina, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at CU Boulder, who also was awarded by Fulbright for a project in Indonesia.

“We’ll have to figure out how to navigate living in a new culture, in a new country. And not just be there as travelers, but to set down some roots so that we really feel like we’re part of the community,” Vance says. “Personally, I’m most excited about trying new foods and completely changing my diet.”

Fulbright project to launch a new statistics course in Indonesia to provide interdisciplinary training and help students make data-driven decisions in everyday life.

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Study: High crime raises diabetes risk

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:07:41 +0000

Study: High crime raises diabetes risk Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/06/2023 - 08:07

Daniel Long

Genes matter, says CU Boulder’s Jason Boardman, but so does the environment

Young adults living in high-crime areas have an increased genetic risk for Type 2 diabetes, according to a recently published study co-authored by Jason Boardman, University of Colorado Boulder professor of sociology and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science’s Health and Society Program.

Boardman and his co-authors published their paper, “Does Crime Trigger Genetic Risk for Type 2 Diabetes in Young Adults? A G x E Interaction Study Using National Data,” in Social Science & Medicine in November.

A key takeaway is that genes are not an irrefutable crystal ball predicting people’s health future. The environment plays a significant role as well.

Jason Boardman teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses in statistics, social demography, and the sociology of race and ethnicity.

“Genes matter,” says Boardman, “but how they are linked to your health depends on where you live.”

Key to understanding why, says Boardman, who studies the social determinants of health, is the notion of environmental triggering, a phenomenon by which the environment elicits certain genetic responses.

It’s a bit like planting a flower, Boardman says, with the seed being people’s genes and the soil, water and sunlight being the environment. The seed may be planted, but without the right environmental conditions, it won’t sprout.

Something similar happens with Type 2 diabetes.

“Genetic risk for Type 2 diabetes does not manifest as a risk absent environmental triggers—in this case, local area crime rate,” Boardman explains. “Indeed, we find that the polygenic risk for Type 2 diabetes is non-existent among residents of communities with little to no crime.”

In other words, genetic variants linked to Type 2 diabetes are not enough to give someone the disease. What counts is how those genes interact with the environment.

Boardman and his colleagues’ findings recast what many consider the primary driver of Type 2 diabetes: obesity, which Boardman says plays not so much a causal role as a mediating one.

To understand how this works, Boardman explains, imagine the same person in two scenarios.

In the first scenario, this person lives in an area with a low crime rate. He or she therefore experiences little stress and has access to healthy coping mechanisms, such as walking or riding a bike outside. This person is consequently unlikely to become obese and develop diabetes.

In the second scenario, however, this same person lives in a high-crime area and has elevated stress levels and limited access to healthy coping mechanisms. This person is therefore more likely to internalize stress, adopt an unhealthy dietary pattern, gain weight and become diabetic.

Same person, same genes, opposite outcomes. The only difference between the two scenarios is the environment.

“Thus,” says Boardman, “what appears to be a biological process is in large part a social process.”

Boardman began studying the social influences of health several decades ago.

“I was fortunate to be part of the Social Environment Working Group of the National Children’s Study in the early 2000s,” he says.

While working with this group, Boardman witnessed the scientific community placing “a great deal of emphasis on collecting and summarizing rich biological measures of population health” while overlooking “comparably rich measures of the social and physical communities in which people live, go to school and play.”

But rather than criticize the field of statistical genetics, Boardman decided to gain training in it. He received a career development award from the Eunice Kenney Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development and, as a tenure-track professor, enrolled in the graduate-training program at CU’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics.

Boardman says that research exploring gene-environment interactions provides a more nuanced understanding of what causes Type 2 diabetes than does the nature-nurture argument.

“The nature-nurture dichotomy gets us nowhere in terms of understanding complex phenomena like the increase in obesity in recent years,” says Boardman, adding that it’s not either nature or nurture that people should be focusing on, but both.

“Nurture fundamentally affects nature, and nature fundamentally affects nurture.”

Boardman also hopes his research will provide a counterpoint to what he considers a worrying trend.

“I am most concerned about the routine practice among researchers utilizing genome-wide data and related summary scores to limit their analyses to individuals who identify with a similar socially defined racial group,” he says.

“My hope is to contribute to methods that provide summary genetic scores that belie the unnecessary need to run models separately by racial and ethnic group.”

Genes matter, says CU Boulder’s Jason Boardman, but so does the environment.

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