Taking our Models Seriously (my talk at StanBio Connect, this Friday 9am)

StanBio is a free, one-day online conference that will take place on Friday, 30 May 2025 from 9 am to 5 pm ET. Here’s my talk:

Taking our Models Seriously

Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University

In biomedical research we often use models that are “mechanistic” rather than “phenomenological”: that is, we try to model an underlying process rather than simply fitting a curve. Mechanistic models are necessary for inference with latent variables (as in pharmacology when there is interest in concentration within an internal organ) and useful for learning and extrapolating from sparse data. We discuss statistical and computational challenges we have resolved, along with some open problems.

Now that I’m posting this, I can’t remember what I was going to say! I guess I’ll have to figure it out between now and Friday morning.