Anomalous Presumptions

Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with an epidemiologist while I was buying a cup of coffee (it’s great to live in a university town).

She confirmed a dark suspicion I’ve had for some time — large population studies do a terrible job of extracting knowledge from their data. They use basic statistical methods, constrained by the traditions of the discipline, and by peer review that has an extremely narrow and wasteful view of what count as valid statistical tools. She also said that even if they had the freedom to use other methods, they don’t know how to find people who understand better tools and can still talk their language.

The sophisticated modeling methods that have been developed in fields like statistical learning aren’t being applied (as far as either of us know) to the very large, rich, expensive and extremely important datasets collected by these large population studies. As a result, we both suspect a lot of important knowledge remains locked up in the data.

For example, her datasets include information about family relationships between subjects, so the right kind of analysis could potentially show how specific aspects of diet interact with different genotypes. But the tools they are using can’t do that.

We’d all be a lot better off if some combinations of funding agencies and researchers could bridge this gap.

Filed by Jed at 3:06 am under Population thinking, Social order
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