ITSA Blog

by Burcu Eke Rubini, Ph.D.

Writing from Within a Network

As a statistician working on network formation, I inevitably see life through a network lens. To me, everything is a network: the people I follow on LinkedIn, my WhatsApp conversations, international flows of exports and imports, the books I read, the laundry hanging from balconies. Because all of them, people, institutions, objects, can, at some level, be represented as nodes. And the relationships between them are edges. In proper graph theoretic terms: every entity is a vertex. Every relationship between them is an edge….

by Mithat Gönen, Ph.D.

Bias, My Anatolian Compatriot

“If you’re a statistician, the word bias triggers a reflex. We are trained to hunt it down, diagnose it, quantify it, adjust for it, and—if possible—eliminate it. Selection bias, information bias, confounding bias, algorithmic bias. Bias is the villain of our discipline.”