Science, Statistics, and Economics
When you change an R package, CRAN expects you to run reverse dependency checks: build every package that depends on yours and see what breaks. When you fix a bug in a statistical package, it might be worth running the equivalent check against papers. To run the check, you need
Consider a design: a query gets embedded, retrieval pulls the nearest labeled examples from a vector store, and an LLM assigns a label from a fixed set. Mechanically this is kNN classification with an LLM head: the store is the training set, retrieval finds the neighbors, and the LLM replaces
A few days ago I was looking at Wirecutter's best-fan guide . The Vornado 630 was \$60 on Amazon, \$80 on Walmart, and \$80 on Vornado's own website. A 33% gap on a fan caught my attention. I wondered how common gaps like this were. So
One of the quieter successes of post-Independence India is that the gender gap in education has closed. The trajectory is plain in the historical data. In 1951, fewer than three in ten girls were enrolled at the primary level, against six in ten boys; at upper primary, girls were
Chaturvedi, Das, and Mahajan (2024) argue that female reservation in the 2015 Gram Panchayat elections raised household toilet provision more in villages with a higher Muslim share. At low Muslim share the estimated reservation effect is essentially zero. In villages where Muslims make up about a quarter of the population,
Asher, Jha, Novosad, Adukia, and Tan report that Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is "only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S." A segregation index, however, is a measure of unevenness, not an explanation of what produced it or what sort of social
The previous post described a conservative record-linkage pipeline: accept only high-confidence matches, flag ambiguous cases, and leave the rest unmatched. That is the right approach when false matches are more costly than missed ones, but it means the matched subset is selected on ease of matching, and estimates
Record linkage is the problem of identifying the same entity across two or more tables that lack a shared unique identifier. You have a name, maybe a district, maybe an age, and you need to figure out which row in table A corresponds to which row in table B. When
Asher, Jha, Novosad, Adukia, and Tan's NBER working paper is a major descriptive contribution. It links three national datasets at the level of the enumeration block, a unit of roughly 100 to 125 households (about 500 people), and builds a dataset covering 1.5 million neighborhoods and about
Testing an agent requires two things: a reproducible world for it to act in, and an explicit contract for what acceptable action looks like. We work out how to specify both, then add the scaffolding that makes a thousand such tests maintainable. We start with what has to be true
The effect of a treatment on an outcome depends on three things: the kind of treatment, the kind of person receiving it, and the context in which it is delivered. A ranking change and a button color change work through different mechanisms. A heavy user and a new user will
Suppose you run a randomized experiment with imperfect compliance. You assigned treatment, measured outcomes, and now you want the LATE. The Wald estimator says divide the ITT by the compliance rate, $\pi = E[D_i \mid Z_i = 1] - E[D_i \mid Z_i = 0]$, and you're
Across 450 parent-child entries drawn from 32 epics and 23 civilizations, 85% of children are sons. 63% of couples have zero daughters, while only 6% have zero sons. I classified each entry by how well-documented the family actually is: mythological (gods like Zeus and Brahma), legendary (human figures
Shuffle your XGBoost training data and you can get a different model. Not different hyperparameters or different features, just a different row order. With tree_method='hist' and multiple threads, the parallel quantile sketch that determines bin boundaries depends on how rows are chunked across workers (see stableboost
In 152 of 203 countries with available data, more women than men are enrolled in tertiary education. The median Gender Parity Index, the ratio of female to male gross enrollment, is 1.22. The interquartile range is [1.00, 1.35]. Only 51 countries remain below parity. The population-weighted