As evidence from evaluation and experimental studies continue to influence decision and policymaking, applied researchers and practitioners require tools to derive valid and credible inferences. Over the past several decades, research in causal inference has progressed with the development and application of propensity scores. Since their…

When planning a cluster randomized trial, evaluators often have access to an enumerated cohort representing the target population of clusters. Practicalities of conducting the trial, such as the need to oversample clusters with certain characteristics in order to improve trial economy or support inferences about subgroups of clusters, may preclude…

A common divide-and-conquer approach for Bayesian computation with big data is to partition the data, perform local inference for each piece separately, and combine the results to obtain a global posterior approximation. While being conceptually and computationally appealing, this method involves the problematic need to also split the prior for…

Biased sampling occurs frequently in economics, epidemiology, and medical studies either by design or due to data collecting mechanism. Failing to take into account the sampling bias usually leads to incorrect inference. We propose a unified estimation procedure and a computationally fast resampling method to make statistical inference for…

Researchers are strongly encouraged to accompany the results of statistical tests with appropriate estimates of effect size. For 2-group comparisons, a probability-based effect size estimator ("A") has many appealing properties (e.g., it is easy to understand, robust to violations of parametric assumptions, insensitive to outliers). We review…

Comparing regression coefficients between models when one model is nested within another is of great practical interest when two explanations of a given phenomenon are specified as linear models. The statistical problem is whether the coefficients associated with a given set of covariates change significantly when other covariates are added into…