POLS/CS&SS 503: Advanced Quantitative Political Methodology
University of Washington, Spring 2017
Instructor: Jeffrey Arnold
TA: Daniel Yoo
Overview
Prerequisites
Logistics
Teaching Team
| Primary | Jeffrey Arnold | jrnold@uw.edu |
| Daniel Yoo | dhyoo@uw.edu |
Office Hours
| Jeff Arnold | M | 11:00am-1:00pm | SMI 221B |
| Daniel Yoo | F | 3:30-4:20pm | SMI 220 |
Instructions for Jeff’s office hours:
Sign up for a 30-minute slot using the Google Calendar appointments link emailed to the class.
Email me 24 hours prior to your appointment with what you would like to discuss.
These instructions will ensure that our time is efficiently spent and I can be of the most help to you.
Communication
In this course we will be using Slack for online class discussion. You will not be required to post, but the system is designed to get you help quickly and efficiently from classmates, and the instructors. Rather than emailing questions to the instructors, post your questions to https://uwpolsmethods.slack.com/. You should have received an invitation to join this team, if not contact us to receive an invite.
Texts
The primary texts for this course are:
- Angrist, Joshua D. and Pischke, Jörn-Steffen. 2015. Mastering Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect
- Bailey. 2015. Real Stats: Using Econometrics for Political Science and Public Policy.
Additional readings are on the schedule.
Software
For computation, this course will rely upon R: a language for statistical computing.
I expect that students will already be familiar with R, so class time will not be spent introducing it. In particular, I expect students to be familiar with the material in R for Data Science. This covers the tidyverse packages used in data wrangling: ggplot, dplyr, tidyr, purrr, readr, haven, stringr, and forcats.
Though not necessary, you are encouraged to use RStudio Desktop integrated development environment (IDE) for R.
Bugs or Questions
If you find any problems in the syllabus or anthing else on this site either open an issue or fix the source and open a pull request.
Rough Schedule of Topics
- Week 1
- RS (Ch 1, 2, 3, 4)
- What is regression?
- Mechanics of OLS
- Properties of least squares
- Bias-variance tradeoff
- Inference
- Git
- Week 2
- Gauss-Markov Theorem
- Omitted Variables (RS: Ch 14)
- Matrix algebra
- Multivariate Regression (RS: Ch 5)
- Inference for multivariate regression
- Week 3
- Dummy variables - (RS: Ch 6)
- Interactions -
- Inference for multiple coefficients
- Week 4
- Outliers / influential points
- Heteroskedasticity
- Functional Form
- Bootstrap
- NHST - research replication
- substantive significance
- Week 5
- Mastering Metrics (MM Ch 1)
- Potential Outcomes
- Experiments
- Week 6
- Matching / Selection on Observables (MM Ch 2, 6.1)
- Week 7
- Instrumental Variables (MM Ch 3, 6.2)
- Week 8
- Regression Discontinuity (MM Ch 4, 6.3)
- Week 9
- Panel data (MM Ch 5)
- Week 10
- Prediction
- Lasso
- Cross Validation
POLS/CS&SS 503: Advanced Quantitative Political Methodology, University of Washington, Spring 2017, by Jeffrey Arnold is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.