Friday, 29 March 2019

Paper of the year 2018

The paper-of-the-year competition sees Eco-Stats members nominate their favourite article hoping to win "free coffee for a year". This year saw a relaxation of some of the previous requirements - no longer did the paper need to be about ecology or statistics; or even be published; in fact one entry was even from the end of 2017. The result was a wide field - from LEGO investors; to fire wielding sh*t hawks; to the earth getting into a bit of a (blueberry) jam. After much debate the results are in:

The winning paper was:


Anders Samberg (2018) Blueberry Planet.

arXiv:1807.10553 [physics.pop-ph]

This paper was nominated by Gordana Popovic because:

It shows very unpretentiously what research involves. You have a question, you find all the research in the area, you mush the two together, you get an answer.


Honourable mentions go to:


Bonta, M et al. (2017) Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia. Journal of Ethnobiology

This paper was nominated by Ben Maslen because:

I like this paper as it outlines a very intriguing and at first glance outlandish ecological behaviour that combines empirical evidence with indigenous ecological knowledge. Birds spreading fires, who knew!


Dobrynskaya, Victoria and Kishilova, Julia (2018) LEGO - The Toy of Smart Investors.

This paper was nominated by Michelle (Shi Jie) Lim because:

I like this paper because Lego toys do not belong to the luxury segment and are affordable to most retail investors. Although the returns may not be significant in reality, the study shows that people are willing to pay a premium for Lego sets. Any Lego toy owner would probably find this paper relatable.


The other nominations in no particular order are:


Zhu and Bradic (2018) Linear Hypothesis Testing in Dense High-Dimensional Linear Models. Journal of the American Statistical Association.

This paper was nominated by David Warton because:

...developing an original new machinery for inference and applying it to a tricky problem, that of simultaneous inference for lots of parameters.


Miller and Sanjurjo (2018) Surprised by the Hot Hand Fallacy?A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers. Econometrica.

This paper was nominated by Robert Nguyen because:

I think this is interesting because it tackles something that generally people believe (there is a hot hand in sport) but as of yet there is no evidence it exists or is there?


Fraser et al. (2018) Questionable research practicesin ecology and evolution. PLoS ONE.

This paper was nominated by Mitchell Lyons because:

I like these types of papers, and there’s been a few lately, including some recent press on some editorials in Nature (Google those if you like. It helps me to gain context on why people (we, and me now) in ecology and evolution think about significance the way they do.


Yixin Wang & David M. Blei (2018): Frequentist Consistency of Variational
Bayes. Journal of the American Statistical Association.

This paper was nominated by Elliot Dovers because:

I like this paper because it provides a firmer theoretical footing for a technique (more generally than has been previously for variational approximations) that has perhaps been used willy-nilly for a long time in computer science (I'm not innocent here either). I also like that the authors give time to addressing (and linking) the technique with respect to both a frequentist and Bayesian approaches. The result "bridges the gap in asymptotic theory between the frequentist variational approximation, in particular the variational frequentist estimate (VFE), and variational Bayes"... good to see authors with a less binary take in on what it means to be a statistician.

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