Presentations

In this talk, Gary King introduces methods of matching for causal inference that are simpler, more powerful, and easier to understand than prior approaches. Software is available to implement everything discussed. Copies of some of his papers on the subject are available at his web site GaryKing.org.

In this talk, Gary King explains that the spectacular progress the media describes as "big data" has little to do with the data.  Data, after all, is becoming commoditized, less expensive, and an automatic byproduct of other changes in organizations and society. More data alone doesn't generate insights; it often just makes data analysis harder. The real revolution isn't about the data, it is about the stunning progress in the statistical methods of extracting insights from the data. He will illustrate these points...

"Dr. Gary King, NAS member and Professor at Harvard University, will talk about progress in and the future of the Social Sciences, illustrated with a wide range of examples from his research. These examples include forecasting the solvency of Social Security; reverse engineering Chinese censorship; estimating causes of death in developing countries; automated text analysis of billions of social media posts; dataverse, software and protocols his team developed to run the largest archive of...

The accuracy of U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) demographic and financial forecasts is crucial for the solvency of its Trust Funds, government programs comprising greater than 50% of all federal government expenditures, industry decision making, and the evidence base of many scholarly articles. Forecasts are also essential for scoring policy proposals put forward by both political parties or anyone else. Because SSA makes public little replication information, and uses ad hoc, qualitative, and antiquated statistical forecasting methods, no one in or out of government has...