🗓️ Week 10 - Prediction vs Explanation

2022/23 Lent Term

Author

Published

20 March 2023

This week there is not much RStudio. Instead, we will dedicate some time to reading key academic references in class and discussing them to practice for the coming summative essays. Click on the Lecture Material to check out the list of articles.

The main question we would be asking ourselves is: what should be the role of modelling (be it statistical, machine learning, simulation, etc.) in the social sciences? Should we aim for explanations, make predictions, or a mix of both? Or is it time we drop the “should”s?

In the class afterwards, you will continue exploring these questions with true real-case scenarios.

📍Location: Monday 20 March 2023, 2 pm - 4 pm at FAW 2.04

👨‍🏫 Lecture Material

Here is the plan we will follow this Monday:

A recap of data science terminology (~30 min)

Do you remember all the terms we have explored so far in this course?

Literature review (~70 min)

Then we will go through the literature on the role of modelling in the social sciences. We will read and discuss the following papers:

Hofman, Jake M., Amit Sharma, and Duncan J. Watts. 2017. “Prediction and Explanation in Social Systems.” Science 355 (6324): 486–88.
Hofman, Jake M., Duncan J. Watts, Susan Athey, Filiz Garip, Thomas L. Griffiths, Jon Kleinberg, Helen Margetts, et al. 2021. “Integrating Explanation and Prediction in Computational Social Science.” Nature 595 (7866): 181–88.
Hullman, Jessica, Sayash Kapoor, Priyanka Nanayakkara, Andrew Gelman, and Arvind Narayanan. 2022. “The Worst of Both Worlds: A Comparative Analysis of Errors in Learning from Data in Psychology and Machine Learning.” In Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 335–48. Oxford United Kingdom: ACM.
Verhagen, Mark D. 2022. “A Pragmatist’s Guide to Using Prediction in the Social Sciences.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 8 (January): 237802312210817.

Online and AI tools for modern literature review (~20 min)

I will show you how to use the following tools to conduct a literature review:

Here is my method to conduct (and automate) a literature review.

Using Google Scholar, @scite , @litmaps , #ChatGPT, @zotero and @obsdmd.

Tutorial with examples and best practices:
👇 pic.twitter.com/MxPCVUnqFl
— Ilya Shabanov (@Artifexx) March 5, 2023

🎥 Looking for lecture recordings? You can only find those on Moodle.

⭐ First Summative Essay

Head to ⭐ Summative 02 page after the lecture to find the instructions for the first summative essay. As indicated in the 📔 Syllabus, the deadline for this essay is Tuesday 4 April 2023.

📚 Recommended Reading

Check the 📔 Syllabus for this week’s complete list of indicative and recommended readings.

📟 Communication

Post your reflections, questions, and links on Slack.
Book office hours if you want to discuss your coursework with me.