Monthly Archives: January 2018
Data Science in biostatistics academic curriculums
In the Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University this 2017-18 school year my colleagues (Jeff Goldsmith and Yifei Sun) have started a sequence on Data Science aimed at our Masters students. It has been very popular and I think this … Continue reading
The misguided goal of figuring out if A causes B or the reverse
Just read a review essay on Causality and Statistical Learning from 2011 in American Journal of Sociology by Andy Gelman (who btw encouraged me several years ago to start my own blog). He reviewed 3 books on Causality by Morgan … Continue reading
To explain or predict
Just discovered the work “To explain or predict” of Galit Shmueli (http://www.galitshmueli.com/content/explain-or-predict). She excellently clarifies the concepts of “explanatory modeling” and “predictive modeling” which mean different things to statisticians, social scientists, computer scientists and other scientists. My own work as a … Continue reading
Why Mental Health Data Science?
My name is Melanie Wall. I am currently the director of Mental Health Data Science in the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and Columbia University psychiatry department. I have been a biostatistician for 20 years. Just this January 2018, I … Continue reading