Data Science

FSRDC 2023 Annual Meeting and Research Conference

From our ashen sky to Foggy Bottom, I traveled alongside the other directors, administrators, census employees, and members from our partnering agencies towards the National Mall in late September for the 2023 Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) Business Meeting and Annual Conference. They were held on September 21st and 22nd at the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC. The hosting Executive Director, Norman Morin, warned all of...

by Enrique Valencia López. Measurement invariance has increasingly become a prerequisite to examine if items in a survey that measure an underlying concept have the same meaning across different cultural and linguistic groups. While there are different ways to examine measurement invariance, the most common approach is using a method known as Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA). In this blog post, I discuss how to conduct a MGCFA using lavaan in R and the different levels needed to establish measurement invariance.

by Kelly Quinn. Reality television shows are notorious for tipping the scales to favor certain players they want to see win, but could producers also be spoiling the results in the process? Drawing on data about Survivor, I attempt to predict the likelihood of a contestant making it far into the game based on editing and production decisions, as well as demographic information. This post describes the model used to classify player outcomes and other potential ways to leverage data about reality TV shows for prediction.

by Millie Chapman. Satellites, smart phones, and other monitoring technologies are creating vast amounts of data about our earth every day. These data hold promise to provide global insights on everything from biodiversity patterns to human activity at increasingly fine spatial and temporal resolution. But leveraging this information often requires us to work with data that is too big to fit in our computer's "working memory" (RAM) or even to download to our computer's hard drive. In this post, I walk through tools, terms, and examples to get started with cloud native workflows. These workflows allow us to remotely access and query large data from online resources or web services, all while skipping the download step!