Blog posts (Things that used to baffle me)

2024

Logit models don’t make mistakes, people do

4 minute read

Published:

I recently found myself reading the large methodological literature on logit models in sociology again. And I think I may have found a way to more intuivtively explain certain things about logit models. I’ll try some ideas here to see if they make sense to people.

2023

Margin call: Is odds ratio really that good?

3 minute read

Published:

It has been commonly argued in sociology that odds ratio—as a measure of association between categorical variables—is appealing, because of its “margin-free” property. This has always baffled me, so I decided to articulate my bafflement here as a sanity check.

Horvitz–Thompson and Weighted Least Squares

4 minute read

Published:

Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is a popular tool for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) of a binary variable under the conditional ignorability assumption. There are multiple variants of IPW. Particularly, I used to be intrigued by the relationship between the so-called Horvitz–Thompson (HT) estimator and the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) estimator, both of which implement IPW.