Applied Statistics – Ben Hansen 

 This week the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by  Ben Hansen , Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan.  Professor Hansen graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy.  He went on to win a Fulbright Fellowship to study philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway, after which he earned his Ph.D. in Logic and Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.   

 Professor Hansen’s primary research interests involve causal inference in comparative studies, particularly observational studies in the social sciences.  His publications appear in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Bernoulli, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Statistics and Probability Letters.  He is currently working on providing methods for statistical adjustment that enable researchers to mount focused, specific analogies of their observational studies to randomized experiments.   

 Professor Hansen will present a talk entitled "Covariate balance in simple, stratified and clustered comparative studies." The working paper that accompanies the talk is available from the  course website . The presentation will be at noon on Wednesday, September 27, in Room N354, CGIS North, 1737 Cambridge St. Lunch will be provided. 

 If you missed the workshop’s first meeting, you should check out the abstract of Jake Bowers’ talk, “ Fixing Broken Experiments: A Proposal to Bolster the Case for Ignorability Using Subclassification and Full Matching ”.