VanderWeele et al.'s paper is a useful contribution to the on-going scientific conversation about the detection of contagion from purely observational data. It is especially helpful as a corrective to some of the more extreme statements of Lyons (2011). Unfortunately, this paper, too, goes too...

Discovering relevant, but possibly hidden, variables is a key step in constructing useful and predictive theories about the natural world. This brief note explains the connections between three approaches to this problem: the recently introduced information-bottleneck method, the computational...

The authors consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an individual's covariates on his or her behavior...

In many applications of functional data analysis, summarising functional variation based on fits, without taking account of the estimation process, runs the risk of attributing the estimation variation to the functional variation, thereby overstating the latter. For example, the first eigenvalue...

Some interpretation of the Bahadur bound and the rate of convergence of the maximum likelihood estimator is provided using a theorem of Fu (1982) and the geometrical methods discussed in Kass (1984). We focus on replicated nonlinear regression and show that, in the sense of rate of convergence...