ASA Community Blogs

NIJ Recidivism Challenge Dataset

By George Mohler posted 07-17-2024
Risk assessment instruments (RAIs) are used during parole decisions to forecast the probability of recidivism. Advocates of RAIs point to higher accuracy of algorithms compared to human decision makers [1] and reductions in the number of re-arrests after parole when algorithms are used in parole decisions [ 2 ]. RAIs are not without criticism; for example, a 2016 ProPublica study of the COMPAS algorithm and dataset highlighted racial disparities in the accuracy of RAIs used to forecast recidivism, showing that the false positive rate for Black individuals was twice as high compared to white individuals in the data [3]. Since the ProPublica ...

Data Spotlight: National crime data UCR SRS and NIBRS, from aggregate counts to incident-based reporting

By Greg Ridgeway posted 06-06-2024
The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was established in 1930 by the FBI to generate reliable crime statistics for law enforcement administration, operation, and management. It has been the primary source of crime data in the United States for decades. The Summary Reporting System The UCR's Summary Reporting System (SRS) is the best known component of the UCR. About 18,000 law enforcement agencies, including municipal police departments, sheriff's departments, campus police, transit police, park police, and many other agencies, reported monthly counts of Part 1 crimes (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, ...

Data Spotlight: The National Registry of Exonerations

By Maria Cuellar posted 04-10-2024
Sample image of the dataset Introduction: The National Registry of Exonerations is an interesting dataset because it is a snapshot of mistakes that were made by the criminal justice system, and were then repaired. At the time of writing this post, there were 3,487 exonerations recorded. Carrying out an exoneration can take years and extensive resources, so many innocent individuals who were wrongfully convicted of a crime are never exonerated. Researchers estimate that "wrongful convictions occur in 6% of criminal convictions leading to imprisonment in an intake population of state prisoners" [1]. Roughly, with 1.2 million individuals in state prisons ...

ASA Committee on Funded Research to Host Funding Opportunities Panel at 2024 JSM

By Steve Pierson posted 04-05-2024
The ASA Committee on Funded Research (CFR) is hosting again its annual meeting at JSM for attendees to learn about funding opportunities directly from representatives of funding agencies. " Funding Opportunities for Statistics and Data Science " is scheduled for 12:15-1:45 pm on Sunday, August 4 in CC-G131 . This meeting has been very well attended in past years and I hope that you'll be part of it this year. So far speakers from the following have been invited: Yong Zeng, NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences ; slides . Cheryl Eavey, Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics program in the Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) ...

FY25 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments

By Steve Pierson posted 03-14-2024
The Biden Administration is released its FY25 budget request by March 11, 2024. This blog entry will track FY25 appropriations developments for NIH, NSF, and AHRQ and so will be updated accordingly. (See log updates below.) To receive notifications of updates, follow ASA Science Policy on Twitter: @ASA_SciPol. See also AAAS initial summary. ​Because this blog entry covers everything from the budget request to the final determination of the budget, it can become quite long. To help with that, I'll try to partition the blog entry: NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences Table Update log See also, FY25 Statistical Agency Budget Developments . ...

FY25 Statistical Agency Budget Developments

By Steve Pierson posted 03-11-2024
The Biden Administration is release its FY25 budget request on March 11, 2025. I will be filling in information as I become aware of it. This blog entry will track FY25 appropriations developments for the federal statistical agencies and so will be updated accordingly. (See update log below.) To receive notifications of updates, follow ASA Science Policy on Twitter: @ASA_SciPol. See also, FY25 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments and federal statistical agency budgets back to fiscal year 2003 (FY03) . FY25 Agency FY18 FY19 FY20 FY21 FY22 FY23 FY24 Request ...

Data Spotlight: LAPD Crime Data Analysis - A Journey from 1988 to the Present

By Greg Ridgeway posted 02-05-2024
Undertaking research that spans over decades can present unique challenges, as was the case for my colleague, John MacDonald, and me. Our focus was on evaluating the impact of the Los Angeles rail transit system's development between 1990 and 2012 on neighborhood crime rates near the newly established transit stations. One significant hurdle we encountered was accessing crime data prior to 2005, which was not available in digital format. Our search led us to the Los Angeles Public Library, where we discovered extensive records in the form of large books filled with quarterly crime statistics, organized by type and LAPD reporting district—the geographic units ...

Congratulations to the 2023 NSF CAREER Awardees!!

By Steve Pierson posted 05-12-2023
Congratulations to the nine 2023 NSF CAREER Awardees funded through the Statistics program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences : Jingshen Wang University of California-Berkeley Andrew Holbrook* University of California-Los Angeles Daniel Sanz-Alonso* University of Chicago Jingshu Wang University of Chicago Subhabrata Sen Harvard University Jason Klusowski Princeton University Sumanta Basu Cornell University Kean Ming Tan Regents of ...

ASA Committee on Funded Research to Host In-Person Funding Opportunities Panel at 2023 JSM

By Steve Pierson posted 04-27-2023
The ASA Committee on Funded Research (CFR) is hosting again its annual meeting at JSM for attendees to learn about funding opportunities directly from representatives of funding agencies. " Funding Opportunities for Statistics " is scheduled for 12:15-1:45 pm on Sunday, August 6 in CC-707. This meeting has been very well attended in past years and I hope that you'll be part of it this year. The speakers invited so far are the following: Yong Zeng and Yulia Gel, NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences and Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. Slides for DMS ; Slides for TIP . Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science ...

FY24 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments

By Steve Pierson posted 03-05-2023
The Biden Administration is expected to release its FY24 budget request by mid-March 2023. I will be filling in information as I become aware of it. This blog entry will track FY21 appropriations developments for NIH, NSF, and AHRQ and so will be updated accordingly. (See log updates below.) To receive notifications of updates, follow ASA Science Policy on Twitter: @ASA_SciPol. See also AAAS initial summary. ​Because this blog entry covers everything from the budget request to the final determination of the budget, it can become quite long. To help with that, I'll try to partition the blog entry: NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences Table Update ...

FY24 Statistical Agency Budget Developments

By Steve Pierson posted 03-05-2023
The Biden Administration is expected to release its FY24 budget request by mid-March, 2023. I will be filling in information as I become aware of it. This blog entry will track FY24 appropriations developments for the federal statistical agencies and so will be updated accordingly. (See update log below.) To receive notifications of updates, follow ASA Science Policy on Twitter: @ASA_SciPol. See also, FY24 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments and federal statistical agency budgets back to fiscal year 2003 (FY03) . . FY24 Agency FY18 FY19 FY20 FY21 FY22 FY23 Request ...

Congressional Appropriators Address NCSES Staffing Needs and NCES Autonomy Issues

By Steve Pierson posted 08-07-2022
Besides their role in determining federal budgets, Appropriations Committees also provide guidance through report language that might include spending instructions, directives, expectations, and spending restrictions . In their FY23 committee reports, appropriators included language addressing operations challenges of federal statistical agencies in addition to their data collection priorities. While not unprecedented, I highlight language related to operations for two agencies to raise awareness of the underlying issues and Congress’ attention to them. The Senate explanatory statement for the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations ...

'CHIPS and Science' Act sent to President for Signing

By Steve Pierson posted 08-05-2022
The "Chips + Science Act" passed both the House and Senate with bipartisan support in late July. President Biden is scheduled to sign it August 9. While the support for the US semiconductor industry has attracted most of the headlines, there are also components having to do with research funding agencies, STEM education, and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics that may be of interest to ASA members. ASA Science Policy Fellow Ed Wu and I briefly overview these three components here, in some cases drawing on summaries by others. Research Funding Agencies For NASA, the National Science Foundation, the DOE Office of Science, and the National ...

2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships include 20 Students Studying Statistics

By Steve Pierson posted 04-08-2022
The 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (GRF) include 17 statistics and biostatistics students. Congratulations to these 2021 recipients! Name Baccalaureate Institution Field of Study Current Institution Bakis, Athanasios University of California-Irvine Computational Statistics University of California-Irvine Balkus, Salvador Victor University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Computational Statistics University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Bekerman, William Cornell University Biostatistics Cornell University Chen, Tony Antong Princeton University Biostatistics Harvard University Compton, ...

ASA Committee on Funded Research to Host In-Person Funding Opportunities at 2022 JSM

By Steve Pierson posted 04-06-2022
The ASA Committee on Funded Research (CFR) is hosting again its annual meeting at JSM for attendees to learn about funding opportunities directly from representatives of funding agencies. "Funding Opportunities for Statistics" is scheduled for 12:15-1:45 pm on Sunday, August 7 in CC-152B: https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2022/onlineprogram/ActivityDetails.cfm?SessionID=223550 . This meeting has been very well attended in past years and I hope that you'll be part of it this year. The speakers so far are the following: Yulia Gel and Edsel Pena, NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences , slides . Cheryl Eavey, Methodology, Measurement, and ...

FY23 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments

By Steve Pierson posted 03-15-2022
The Biden Administration is expected to release its FY23 budget request by March 31 2022. I will be filling in information as I become aware of it. This blog entry will track FY21 appropriations developments for NIH, NSF, and AHRQ and so will be updated accordingly. (See log updates below.) To receive notifications of updates, follow ASA Science Policy on Twitter: @ASA_SciPol. See also AAAS initial summary. ​Because this blog entry covers everything from the budget request to the final determination of the budget, it can become quite long. To help with that, I'll try to partition the blog entry: NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences Table Update ...

FY23 Statistical Agency Budget Developments

By Steve Pierson posted 03-15-2022
The Biden Administration is expected to release its FY23 budget request by March 31, 2022. I will be filling in information as I become aware of it. This blog entry will track FY23 appropriations developments for the federal statistical agencies and so will be updated accordingly. (See update log below.) To receive notifications of updates, follow ASA Science Policy on Twitter: @ASA_SciPol. See also, Administration Releases FY23 Budget Request as Congress Finalizes FY22 Budget, FY23 NIH, NSF, and AHRQ Budget Developments and federal statistical agency budgets back to fiscal year 2003 (FY03) . . FY23 ...

White House ‘Science Integrity' Report Explicitly Includes Federal Statistical Agencies

By Steve Pierson posted 02-07-2022
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released in January, 2022 the report, “ Protecting the Integrity of Government Science ,” which the White House characterized as a response to the President’s January 2021 Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking . The report covers broadly science across the federal government, including content specific to government statistics: “Federal statistical agencies, such as the Census Bureau, must protect against interference in their efforts to create and release data that provide a set of common facts to inform policymakers, researchers, ...

ASA provides National Academies Panel statistical perspectives on furthering education research at Department of Education

By Steve Pierson posted 10-11-2021
After consulting with several education research experts in its membership, the ASA provided the National Academies panel considering the future of education research at the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education several recommendations from a statistical perspective. The text of the letter is below; a link to the pdf will be provided when the ASA website is updated. October 5, 2021 Adam Gamoran Chair, Committee on The Future of Education Research at the Institute of Education Sciences in the US Department of Education National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [Transmitted electronically] Dear Dr. Gamoran, ...

Number of Distinct Samples in Bootstrap

By Md Riaz Ahmed Khan posted 07-17-2021
Bootstrap is a handy method of doing inference when parametric distribution is not available or difficult to obtain. An obvious question related to bootstrap seeks the number of distinct bootstrap samples can be drawn from an initial sample of certain size. Using a dot-bar representation, the problem takes a much simpler form and the solution can be easily obtained . ​