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Methods Explorer is a visual introduction to methods used in social science research: causal inference, networks, statistical learning, and text as data.方法探索是对社会研究方法的可视介绍:因果推断、网络、统计学习,以及文本作为数据。
Each lab is one question and one picture you can adjust.每个实验是一个问题,和一张可以调节的图。
Under the chart, each lab names one misreading and says when the picture is enough for intuition. One path walks from a text count to adjustment and a match on a single summary.图的下面,每个实验点出一种读错,并说明这张图何时够用来建立直觉。有一条路径从文本计数走到调整,再到对一个概括分数的匹配。
The glossary gathers the terms from the labs.术语页收着实验里的这些词。
Built by Xiaoyu Liu.由刘晓宇制作。
Sources来源
The labs are short explanations of standard ideas — confounding, matching, community structure, contagion on a graph, overfitting, regularization, and reading text as counts or coordinates. The books below are where those ideas are taught.这些实验是对一些标准想法的短说明:混杂、匹配、社区结构、图上的传染、过拟合、正则化,以及把文本看成计数或坐标。下面的书是这些想法的出处。
Books书
Causal因果
- Miguel A. Hernán and James M. Robins, Causal Inference: What If. Topics: confounding, exchangeability, and why an association is not yet an effect. The lab is the linear special case in which one common cause is omitted.。主题:混杂、可交换性,以及为何关联还不是效应。实验是省略一个共同原因的线性特例。 Author page for the book作者的书页.
- Judea Pearl, Causality. Topic: causal diagrams. A confounder is drawn as a common cause. The lab uses one small diagram, not a general identification proof.。主题:因果图。混杂因素画成共同原因。实验只用一张小图,不是一般的识别证明。 Book site图书网站.
- Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics (Princeton University Press). Topic: regression and omitted variables.(普林斯顿大学出版社)。主题:回归与遗漏变量。
- Scott Cunningham, Causal Inference: The Mixtape. Topic: confounding and regression adjustment, taught around the question of whether a slope is an effect.。主题:混杂与回归调整,围绕“斜率是不是效应”来讲。 Book site图书网站.
- Paul R. Rosenbaum and Donald B. Rubin (1983), “The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects,” Biometrika. Topic: a score that summarizes how covariates predict treatment. The matching lab has one covariate, so matching on X and matching on that score put units in the same order.。主题:用一个分数概括协变量如何预测处理。匹配实验只有一个协变量,所以按 X 匹配和按这个分数匹配,单位的顺序相同。
- Elizabeth A. Stuart (2010), “Matching methods for causal inference: a review and a look forward,” Statistical Science. Topics: calipers, covariate balance, and the fact that unmatched units leave the sample. The lab is a greedy one-to-one caliper match, not the review’s full catalogue of estimators.。主题:卡尺、协变量平衡,以及未匹配单位会离开样本。实验是贪心的一一卡尺匹配,不是那篇综述里的全部估计量。
Networks网络
- Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge University Press). Topics: ties, paths, components, and subgroups. The lab reports components and a raw within-group edge share, not a full assortativity index.(剑桥大学出版社)。主题:连边、路径、连通分量和子群。实验报告连通分量和原始的组内边占比,不是完整的同配指数。
- Paul W. Holland, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey, and Samuel Leinhardt (1983) on stochastic block models, as cited in the NetworkX stochastic block model documentation. Topic: ties drawn independently from group-pair probabilities. The lab is given the groups. It does not estimate them.。主题:按组对概率独立抽取连边。实验被给定了组。它不估计组。
- Mark Newman, Networks: An Introduction (Oxford University Press). Topic: an epidemic on a graph. The diffusion lab is a susceptible–infected process on the same two-group graph. An outbreak cannot leave the index case’s component, and a bridge is what lets it reach the other group.(牛津大学出版社)。主题:图上的流行病。扩散实验是同一张两组图上的易感—感染过程。疫情不能离开指示病例所在的连通分量,桥让它到达另一组。
Machine learning机器学习
- Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani, An Introduction to Statistical Learning. Topics: the bias–variance tradeoff, overfitting, and the comparison of training and test error, including polynomial fits. The regularization lab uses the same book’s ridge and lasso idea: a penalty that shrinks slopes, and, for the absolute penalty, can set some slopes to zero.。主题:偏差—方差权衡、过拟合,以及训练误差与测试误差的比较,包括多项式拟合。正则化实验用同一本书里的岭回归和套索想法:惩罚缩小斜率;绝对惩罚还可以把一些斜率设成零。 Book site图书网站. Both labs use this site’s own sine-wave simulation.。两个实验都用本站自己的正弦波模拟。
- Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning. Topic, at a high level: more flexible functions fit a training sample more closely and can vary more across samples. The lab does not estimate bias and variance as separate terms.。主题,在较高层面上:更灵活的函数更贴近训练样本,也可能在不同样本之间变化更大。实验不把偏差和方差估计成分开的项。 Book site图书网站.
Text as data文本作为数据
- Justin Grimmer, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart, Text as Data文本作为数据 (Princeton University Press). Topics: choosing a representation, the bag of words, the document-term matrix, topic models as mixtures over K word distributions, and low-dimensional word representations. The labs use sentences written here. The topic-count page clusters counts and says so. The word-map page places coordinates by hand. Neither fits a topic model or trains an embedding, and neither reproduces a corpus analysis from the book.(普林斯顿大学出版社)。主题:选择表示、词袋、文档—词矩阵、作为 K 个词分布之混合的主题模型,以及词的低维表示。实验用这里写的句子。主题个数页对计数做聚类,并如此说明。词图页用手放置坐标。两者都不拟合主题模型,也不训练嵌入,也不复现书中的语料分析。
Interactive references交互式参考
These works informed the decision to teach with adjustable pictures. No third-party visualisation code or research data is bundled.这些工作影响了“用可调图形来教学”的决定。这里不捆绑第三方可视化代码或研究数据。
- Seeing Theory — reference for learning through adjustable visualisations.——通过可调图形学习的参考。
- Bynum and colleagues: An Interactive Introduction to Causal Inference — VISxAI 2022; source repository源代码仓库.
- NetworkX stochastic block model documentation — model definition and the Holland, Laskey & Leinhardt (1983) reference.——模型定义,以及 Holland、Laskey 与 Leinhardt(1983)的文献。
- scikit-learn: Underfitting vs. Overfitting — reference for the polynomial-regression teaching example; this site uses its own sine-wave simulation and validation sample.——多项式回归教学例子的参考;本站用自己的正弦波模拟和验证样本。
- Math Insight applets and MIT Mathlets — references for parameter-driven mathematical exploration.——参数驱动的数学探索的参考。
- Complexity Explorables — reference for interactive complex-systems models.——交互式复杂系统模型的参考。