Article | Summer 2007
Applied Statistics Center Launched
How many people do you know named Kevin? How many people do you know in prison? According to researchers at the newly launched Applied Statistics Center (ASC), these questions can reveal important metrics of social polarization, including estimates of social network size and social structure.
Joel Beal (Undergraduate Fellow/Economics-Mathematics), Kevin Chou (Economics), Andrew Gelman (Political Science/Statistics), and Delia Baldassarri (Graduate Fellow/Sociology) work on their project.
Social polarization is only one of the many topics investigated by ASC, ISERP's latest effort to stimulate collaborative research in the social sciences and related fields. Led by Andrew Gelman (Political Science/Statistics), the Center was established in January 2007 to conduct substantive and methodologically-oriented research projects in the human, health, social, and engineering sciences. This initiative is a true interdisciplinary undertaking, launched with support from ISERP, the Earth Institute, the Center for Computational Learning Systems, the School of Social Work, the Law School, and the political science and statistics departments. In addition, the Center has initiated partnerships with researchers at New York University and Mount Sinai Medical Center.
"We set up the center so all of us at Columbia can help each other on our quantitative research projects," says ASC Director Andrew Gelman. "There's so much expertise here and so many interesting projects, but people aren't always aware of each other and don't always have time to talk about each other's projects. Our pool of students, faculty, postdocs, and visiting scholars will be able to help make these connections and move projects forward. Already, we've had some successes, for example, with the project by Justin Phillips and Jeff Lax on public opinion and gay rights and with the project led by Lex van Geen on arsenic in Bangladesh."
Since its launch, ASC has rapidly expanded its research portfolio. Center affiliates are currently engaged in applied research projects on American public opinion and policy, homelessness in New York City, arsenic-contaminated drinking water in Bangladesh, reversals of death sentences, and asthma in children, among others. Methodological projects include computation for multilevel models with interactions, graphical methods for understanding regression models, model checking for missing-data imputation, nonparametric models for causal inference, and model-based survey weighting. These projects convene over 60 faculty members, graduate students, and other scholars from a wide range of disciplines.
In addition to coordinating existing projects, the Center's mission is to create a community of scholars and facilitate the development of new projects. To this end, it supports visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows, hosts seminars, and assembles interdisciplinary research teams of statisticians and quantitative social scientists for data-rich projects. ASC created an important opportunity for open discussion among scholars when it established the quantitative political science Playroom, a venue for faculty and students to stop by and informally exchange ideas about their research. Several of the Center's projects and initiatives also have regularly scheduled public forums, including the weekly quantitative political science seminar, a Mexican politics working group, a working group on social and political polarization, and a new monthly workshop on statistical methods in the law.
The Applied Statistics Center is having an impressive first year. With new initiatives underway and plans to link up with other projects on campus, the second year promises to be equally exciting.
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