Jennifer Hill Wins Society for Political Methodology’s 2017 Miller Prize

August 22, 2017

New York, NY — Jennifer Hill, a professor at NYU’s Center for Data Science (CDS) and NYU’s Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and the Humanities, has won Political Analysis’s Miller Prize for her co-authored paper, “Bias Amplification and Bias Unmasking.”

The Miller Prize is awarded annually for the best work published in Political Analysis, the official journal of the Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association.

Written with Joel A. Middleton (UC Berkeley), Marc A. Scott (NYU Steinhardt and also an affiliate of CDS), and Ronli Diakow (New York City’s Department of Education), the winning study investigates unexpected sources of bias in observational studies.

“They emphasize,” the selection committee explained, “the potential for group fixed effects, often seen as a benign robustness strategy, to increase bias through both amplification and unmasking.” Moreover, the researchers also “develop tools for sensitivity analysis to help applied researchers reason through these problems” in the paper.

“These methodological contributions are cleverly and lucidly illustrated through constructed observational placebo studies, which demonstrate the striking increases in bias that result from the inclusion of fixed effects.”

The paper is also central to Hill’s work at the PRIISM Applied Statistics Center, a university-wide initiative devoted to improving statistical practice, where she is co-director with Scott.

Last year’s Miller Prize winner was former CDS Moore-Sloan Fellow, Pablo Barbera, for his paper, “Birds of the same feather tweet together: Bayesian ideal point estimation using Twitter data.”


About NYU’s Center for Data Science
The Center for Data Science (CDS) is the focal point for NYU’s university-wide initiative in data science and statistics. Established in 2013 by Yann LeCun (who is now the director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook), CDS is a leading data science training and research facility that collaborates with other schools within NYU, and offers both an MS in Data Science and Ph.D. in Data Science. More information can be found at cds.nyu.edu and @NYUDataScience.

Center for Data Science

This is the official research blog of the NYU Center for Data Science (CDS). Established in 2013, we are a leading data science training and research facility, offering a MS in Data Science and, as of 2017, one of the nation’s first universities to offer a Ph.D. in Data Science.

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NYU Center for Data Science

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Official account of the Center for Data Science at NYU, home of the Master’s and Ph.D. in Data Science.

Center for Data Science

This is the official research blog of the NYU Center for Data Science (CDS). Established in 2013, we are a leading data science training and research facility, offering a MS in Data Science and, as of 2017, one of the nation’s first universities to offer a Ph.D. in Data Science.

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