Polymath proposal: clearinghouse for crowdsourcing COVID-19 data and data cleaning requests

After some discussion with the applied math research groups here at UCLA (in particular the groups led by Andrea Bertozzi and Deanna Needell), one of the members of these groups, Chris Strohmeier, has produced a proposal for a Polymath project to crowdsource in a single repository (a) a collection of public data sets relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, (b) requests for such data sets, (c) requests for data cleaning of such sets, and (d) submissions of cleaned data sets.  (The proposal can be viewed as a PDF, and is also available on Overleaf).  As mentioned in the proposal, this database would be slightly different in focus than existing data sets such as the COVID-19 data sets hosted on Kaggle, with a focus on producing high quality cleaned data sets.  (Another relevant data set that I am aware of is the SafeGraph aggregated foot traffic data, although this data set, while open, is not quite public as it requires a non-commercial agreement to execute.  Feel free to mention further relevant data sets in the comments.)

This seems like a very interesting and timely proposal to me and I would like to open it up for discussion, for instance by proposing some seed requests for data and data cleaning and to discuss possible platforms that such a repository could be built on.  In the spirit of “building the plane while flying it”, one could begin by creating a basic github repository as a prototype and use the comments in this blog post to handle requests, and then migrate to a more high quality platform once it becomes clear what direction this project might move in.  (For instance one might eventually move beyond data cleaning to more sophisticated types of data analysis.)

UPDATE, Mar 25: a prototype page for such a clearinghouse is now up at this wiki page.

UPDATE, Mar 27: the data cleaning aspect of this project largely duplicates the existing efforts at the United against COVID-19 project, so we are redirecting requests of this type to that project (and specifically to their data discourse page).  The polymath proposal will now refocus on crowdsourcing a list of public data sets relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus outbreak: mathematics of epidemics, and what it can and cannot tell us (Nicolas Jewell)

At the most recent MSRI board of trustees meeting on Mar 7 (conducted online, naturally), Nicolas Jewell (a Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at Berkeley, also affiliated with the Berkeley School of Public Health and the London School of Health and Tropical Disease), gave a presentation on the current coronavirus epidemic entitled “2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus outbreak: mathematics of epidemics, and what it can and cannot tell us”.  The presentation (updated with Mar 18 data), hosted by David Eisenbud (the director of MSRI), together with a question and answer session, is now on Youtube:

(I am on this board, but could not make it to this particular meeting; I caught up on the presentation later, and thought it would of interest to several readers of this blog.)  While there is some mathematics in the presentation, it is relatively non-technical.

How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?

Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studied in the appropriate literature; I would appreciate knowing of any links to such.

Suppose one assigns true-false questions on an examination, with the answers randomised so that each question is equally likely to have “true” as the correct answer as “false”, with no correlation between different questions. Suppose that the students taking the examination must answer each question with exactly one of “true” or “false” (they are not allowed to skip any question). Then it is easy to see how to grade the exam: one can simply count how many questions each student answered correctly (i.e. each correct answer scores one point, and each incorrect answer scores zero points), and give that number as the final grade of the examination. More generally, one could assign some score of points to each correct answer and some score (possibly negative) of points to each incorrect answer, giving a total grade of points. As long as , this grade is simply an affine rescaling of the simple grading scheme and would serve just as well for the purpose of evaluating the students, as well as encouraging each student to answer the questions as correctly as possible.

In practice, though, a student will probably not know the answer to each individual question with absolute certainty. One can adopt a probabilistic model, where for a given student and a given question , the student  may think that the answer to question is true with probability and false with probability , where is some quantity that can be viewed as a measure of confidence has in the answer (with being confident that the answer is true if is close to , and confident that the answer is false if is close to ); for simplicity let us assume that in ‘s probabilistic model, the answers to each question are independent random variables. Given this model, and assuming that the student wishes to maximise his or her expected grade on the exam, it is an easy matter to see that the optimal strategy for to take is to answer question true if and false if . (If , the student can answer arbitrarily.)

[Important note: here we are not using the term “confidence” in the technical sense used in statistics, but rather as an informal term for “subjective probability”.]

This is fine as far as it goes, but for the purposes of evaluating how well the student actually knows the material, it provides only a limited amount of information, in particular we do not get to directly see the student’s subjective probabilities for each question. If for instance answered out of questions correctly, was it because he or she actually knew the right answer for seven of the questions, or was it because he or she was making educated guesses for the ten questions that turned out to be slightly better than random chance? There seems to be no way to discern this if the only input the student is allowed to provide for each question is the single binary choice of true/false.

But what if the student were able to give probabilistic answers to any given question? That is to say, instead of being forced to answer just “true” or “false” for a given question , the student was allowed to give answers such as “ confident that the answer is true” (and hence confidence the answer is false). Such answers would give more insight as to how well the student actually knew the material; in particular, we would theoretically be able to actually see the student’s subjective probabilities .

But now it becomes less clear what the right grading scheme to pick is. Suppose for instance we wish to extend the simple grading scheme in which an correct answer given in confidence is awarded one point. How many points should one award a correct answer given in confidence? How about an incorrect answer given in confidence (or equivalently, a correct answer given in confidence)?

Mathematically, one could design a grading scheme by selecting some grading function and then awarding a student points whenever they indicate the correct answer with a confidence of . For instance, if the student was confident that the answer was “true” (and hence confident that the answer was “false”), then this grading scheme would award the student points if the correct answer actually was “true”, and points if the correct answer actually was “false”. One can then ask the question of what functions would be “best” for this scheme?

Intuitively, one would expect that should be monotone increasing – one should be rewarded more for being correct with high confidence, than correct with low confidence. On the other hand, some sort of “partial credit” should still be assigned in the latter case. One obvious proposal is to just use a linear grading function – thus for instance a correct answer given with confidence might be worth points. But is this the “best” option?

To make the problem more mathematically precise, one needs an objective criterion with which to evaluate a given grading scheme. One criterion that one could use here is the avoidance of perverse incentives. If a grading scheme is designed badly, a student may end up overstating or understating his or her confidence in an answer in order to optimise the (expected) grade: the optimal level of confidence for a student to report on a question may differ from that student’s subjective confidence . So one could ask to design a scheme so that is always equal to , so that the incentive is for the student to honestly report his or her confidence level in the answer.

This turns out to give a precise constraint on the grading function . If a student thinks that the answer to a question is true with probability and false with probability , and enters in an answer of “true” with confidence (and thus “false” with confidence ), then student would expect a grade of

on average for this question. To maximise this expected grade (assuming differentiability of , which is a reasonable hypothesis for a partial credit grading scheme), one performs the usual maneuvre of differentiating in the independent variable and setting the result to zero, thus obtaining

In order to avoid perverse incentives, the maximum should occur at , thus we should have

for all . This suggests that the function should be constant. (Strictly speaking, it only gives the weaker constraint that is symmetric around ; but if one generalised the problem to allow for multiple-choice questions with more than two possible answers, with a grading scheme that depended only on the confidence assigned to the correct answer, the same analysis would in fact force to be constant in ; we leave this computation to the interested reader.) In other words, should be of the form for some ; by monotonicity we expect to be positive. If we make the normalisation (so that no points are awarded for a split in confidence between true and false) and , one arrives at the grading scheme

Thus, if a student believes that an answer is “true” with confidence and “false” with confidence , he or she will be awarded points when the correct answer is “true”, and points if the correct answer is “false”. The following table gives some illustrative values for this scheme:

Confidence that answer is “true”	Points awarded if answer is “true”	Points awarded if answer is “false”

Note the large penalties for being extremely confident of an answer that ultimately turns out to be incorrect; in particular, answers of confidence should be avoided unless one really is absolutely certain as to the correctness of one’s answer.

The total grade given under such a scheme to a student who answers each question to be “true” with confidence , and “false” with confidence , is

This grade can also be written as

where

is the likelihood of the student ‘s subjective probability model, given the outcome of the correct answers. Thus the grade system here has another natural interpretation, as being an affine rescaling of the log-likelihood. The incentive is thus for the student to maximise the likelihood of his or her own subjective model, which aligns well with standard practices in statistics. From the perspective of Bayesian probability, the grade given to a student can then be viewed as a measurement (in logarithmic scale) of how much the posterior probability that the student’s model was correct has improved over the prior probability.

One could propose using the above grading scheme to evaluate predictions to binary events, such as an upcoming election with only two viable candidates, to see in hindsight just how effective each predictor was in calling these events. One difficulty in doing so is that many predictions do not come with explicit probabilities attached to them, and attaching a default confidence level of to any prediction made without any such qualification would result in an automatic grade of if even one of these predictions turned out to be incorrect. But perhaps if a predictor refuses to attach confidence level to his or her predictions, one can assign some default level of confidence to these predictions, and then (using some suitable set of predictions from this predictor as “training data”) find the value of that maximises this predictor’s grade. This level can then be used going forward as the default level of confidence to apply to any future predictions from this predictor.

The above grading scheme extends easily enough to multiple-choice questions. But one question I had trouble with was how to deal with uncertainty, in which the student does not know enough about a question to venture even a probability of being true or false. Here, it is natural to allow a student to leave a question blank (i.e. to answer “I don’t know”); a more advanced option would be to allow the student to enter his or her confidence level as an interval range (e.g. “I am between and confident that the answer is “true””). But now I do not have a good proposal for a grading scheme; once there is uncertainty in the student’s subjective model, the problem of that student maximising his or her expected grade becomes ill-posed due to the “unknown unknowns”, and so the previous criterion of avoiding perverse incentives becomes far less useful.

Sweeping a matrix rotates its graph

I recently learned about a curious operation on square matrices known as sweeping, which is used in numerical linear algebra (particularly in applications to statistics), as a useful and more robust variant of the usual Gaussian elimination operations seen in undergraduate linear algebra courses. Given an matrix (with, say, complex entries) and an index , with the entry non-zero, the sweep of at is the matrix given by the formulae

for all . Thus for instance if , and is written in block form as

for some row vector , column vector , and minor , one has

The inverse sweep operation is given by a nearly identical set of formulae:

for all . One can check that these operations invert each other. Actually, each sweep turns out to have order , so that : an inverse sweep performs the same operation as three forward sweeps. Sweeps also preserve the space of symmetric matrices (allowing one to cut down computational run time in that case by a factor of two), and behave well with respect to principal minors; a sweep of a principal minor is a principal minor of a sweep, after adjusting indices appropriately.

Remarkably, the sweep operators all commute with each other: . If and we perform the first sweeps (in any order) to a matrix

with a minor, a matrix, a matrix, and a matrix, one obtains the new matrix

Note the appearance of the Schur complement in the bottom right block. Thus, for instance, one can essentially invert a matrix by performing all sweeps:

If a matrix has the form

for a minor , column vector , row vector , and scalar , then performing the first sweeps gives

and all the components of this matrix are usable for various numerical linear algebra applications in statistics (e.g. in least squares regression). Given that sweeps behave well with inverses, it is perhaps not surprising that sweeps also behave well under determinants: the determinant of can be factored as the product of the entry and the determinant of the matrix formed from by removing the row and column. As a consequence, one can compute the determinant of fairly efficiently (so long as the sweep operations don’t come close to dividing by zero) by sweeping the matrix for in turn, and multiplying together the entry of the matrix just before the sweep for to obtain the determinant.

It turns out that there is a simple geometric explanation for these seemingly magical properties of the sweep operation. Any matrix creates a graph (where we think of as the space of column vectors). This graph is an -dimensional subspace of . Conversely, most subspaces of arises as graphs; there are some that fail the vertical line test, but these are a positive codimension set of counterexamples.

We use to denote the standard basis of , with the standard basis for the first factor of and the standard basis for the second factor. The operation of sweeping the entry then corresponds to a ninety degree rotation in the plane, that sends to (and to ), keeping all other basis vectors fixed: thus we have

for generic (more precisely, those with non-vanishing entry ). For instance, if and is of the form (1), then is the set of tuples obeying the equations

The image of under is . Since we can write the above system of equations (for ) as

we see from (2) that is the graph of . Thus the sweep operation is a multidimensional generalisation of the high school geometry fact that the line in the plane becomes after applying a ninety degree rotation.

It is then an instructive exercise to use this geometric interpretation of the sweep operator to recover all the remarkable properties about these operations listed above. It is also useful to compare the geometric interpretation of sweeping as rotation of the graph to that of Gaussian elimination, which instead shears and reflects the graph by various elementary transformations (this is what is going on geometrically when one performs Gaussian elimination on an augmented matrix). Rotations are less distorting than shears, so one can see geometrically why sweeping can produce fewer numerical artefacts than Gaussian elimination.

When is correlation transitive?

Given two unit vectors in a real inner product space, one can define the correlation between these vectors to be their inner product , or in more geometric terms, the cosine of the angle subtended by and . By the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, this is a quantity between and , with the extreme positive correlation occurring when are identical, the extreme negative correlation occurring when are diametrically opposite, and the zero correlation occurring when are orthogonal. This notion is closely related to the notion of correlation between two non-constant square-integrable real-valued random variables , which is the same as the correlation between two unit vectors lying in the Hilbert space of square-integrable random variables, with being the normalisation of defined by subtracting off the mean and then dividing by the standard deviation of , and similarly for and .

One can also define correlation for complex (Hermitian) inner product spaces by taking the real part of the complex inner product to recover a real inner product.

While reading the (highly recommended) recent popular maths book “How not to be wrong“, by my friend and co-author Jordan Ellenberg, I came across the (important) point that correlation is not necessarily transitive: if correlates with , and correlates with , then this does not imply that correlates with . A simple geometric example is provided by the three unit vectors

in the Euclidean plane : and have a positive correlation of , as does and , but and are not correlated with each other. Or: for a typical undergraduate course, it is generally true that good exam scores are correlated with a deep understanding of the course material, and memorising from flash cards are correlated with good exam scores, but this does not imply that memorising flash cards is correlated with deep understanding of the course material.

However, there are at least two situations in which some partial version of transitivity of correlation can be recovered. The first is in the “99%” regime in which the correlations are very close to : if are unit vectors such that is very highly correlated with , and is very highly correlated with , then this does imply that is very highly correlated with . Indeed, from the identity

(and similarly for and ) and the triangle inequality

we see that

Thus, for instance, if and , then . This is of course closely related to (though slightly weaker than) the triangle inequality for angles:

Remark 1 (Thanks to Andrew Granville for conversations leading to this observation.) The inequality (1) also holds for sub-unit vectors, i.e. vectors with . This comes by extending in directions orthogonal to all three original vectors and to each other in order to make them unit vectors, enlarging the ambient Hilbert space if necessary. More concretely, one can apply (1) to the unit vectors

in .

But even in the “” regime in which correlations are very weak, there is still a version of transitivity of correlation, known as the van der Corput lemma, which basically asserts that if a unit vector is correlated with many unit vectors , then many of the pairs will then be correlated with each other. Indeed, from the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality

we see that

Thus, for instance, if for at least values of , then (after removing those indices for which ) must be at least , which implies that for at least pairs . Or as another example: if a random variable exhibits at least positive correlation with other random variables , then if , at least two distinct must have positive correlation with each other (although this argument does not tell you which pair are so correlated). Thus one can view this inequality as a sort of `pigeonhole principle” for correlation.

A similar argument (multiplying each by an appropriate sign ) shows the related van der Corput inequality

and this inequality is also true for complex inner product spaces. (Also, the do not need to be unit vectors for this inequality to hold.)

Geometrically, the picture is this: if positively correlates with all of the , then the are all squashed into a somewhat narrow cone centred at . The cone is still wide enough to allow a few pairs to be orthogonal (or even negatively correlated) with each other, but (when is large enough) it is not wide enough to allow all of the to be so widely separated. Remarkably, the bound here does not depend on the dimension of the ambient inner product space; while increasing the number of dimensions should in principle add more “room” to the cone, this effect is counteracted by the fact that in high dimensions, almost all pairs of vectors are close to orthogonal, and the exceptional pairs that are even weakly correlated to each other become exponentially rare. (See this previous blog post for some related discussion; in particular, Lemma 2 from that post is closely related to the van der Corput inequality presented here.)

A particularly common special case of the van der Corput inequality arises when is a unit vector fixed by some unitary operator , and the are shifts of a single unit vector . In this case, the inner products are all equal, and we arrive at the useful van der Corput inequality

(In fact, one can even remove the absolute values from the right-hand side, by using (2) instead of (4).) Thus, to show that has negligible correlation with , it suffices to show that the shifts of have negligible correlation with each other.

Here is a basic application of the van der Corput inequality:

Proposition 2 (Weyl equidistribution estimate) Let be a polynomial with at least one non-constant coefficient irrational. Then one has

where .

Note that this assertion implies the more general assertion

for any non-zero integer (simply by replacing by ), which by the Weyl equidistribution criterion is equivalent to the sequence being asymptotically equidistributed in .

Proof: We induct on the degree of the polynomial , which must be at least one. If is equal to one, the claim is easily established from the geometric series formula, so suppose that and that the claim has already been proven for . If the top coefficient of is rational, say , then by partitioning the natural numbers into residue classes modulo , we see that the claim follows from the induction hypothesis; so we may assume that the top coefficient is irrational.

In order to use the van der Corput inequality as stated above (i.e. in the formalism of inner product spaces) we will need a non-principal ultrafilter (see e.g this previous blog post for basic theory of ultrafilters); we leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how to present the argument below without the use of ultrafilters (or similar devices, such as Banach limits). The ultrafilter defines an inner product on bounded complex sequences by setting

Strictly speaking, this inner product is only positive semi-definite rather than positive definite, but one can quotient out by the null vectors to obtain a positive-definite inner product. To establish the claim, it will suffice to show that

for every non-principal ultrafilter .

Note that the space of bounded sequences (modulo null vectors) admits a shift , defined by

This shift becomes unitary once we quotient out by null vectors, and the constant sequence is clearly a unit vector that is invariant with respect to the shift. So by the van der Corput inequality, we have

for any . But we may rewrite . Then observe that if , is a polynomial of degree whose coefficient is irrational, so by induction hypothesis we have for . For we of course have , and so

for any . Letting , we obtain the claim.

Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution

A remarkable phenomenon in probability theory is that of universality – that many seemingly unrelated probability distributions, which ostensibly involve large numbers of unknown parameters, can end up converging to a universal law that may only depend on a small handful of parameters. One of the most famous examples of the universality phenomenon is the central limit theorem; another rich source of examples comes from random matrix theory, which is one of the areas of my own research.

Analogous universality phenomena also show up in empirical distributions – the distributions of a statistic from a large population of “real-world” objects. Examples include Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution (of which the Pareto principle or 80-20 law is a special case). These laws govern the asymptotic distribution of many statistics which

• (i) take values as positive numbers;
• (ii) range over many different orders of magnitude;
• (iiii) arise from a complicated combination of largely independent factors (with different samples of arising from different independent factors); and
• (iv) have not been artificially rounded, truncated, or otherwise constrained in size.

Examples here include the population of countries or cities, the frequency of occurrence of words in a language, the mass of astronomical objects, or the net worth of individuals or corporations. The laws are then as follows:

• Benford’s law: For , the proportion of whose first digit is is approximately . Thus, for instance, should have a first digit of about of the time, but a first digit of only about of the time.
• Zipf’s law: The largest value of should obey an approximate power law, i.e. it should be approximately for the first few and some parameters . In many cases, is close to .
• Pareto distribution: The proportion of with at least digits (before the decimal point), where is above the median number of digits, should obey an approximate exponential law, i.e. be approximately of the form for some . Again, in many cases is close to .

Benford’s law and Pareto distribution are stated here for base , which is what we are most familiar with, but the laws hold for any base (after replacing all the occurrences of in the above laws with the new base, of course). The laws tend to break down if the hypotheses (i)-(iv) are dropped. For instance, if the statistic concentrates around its mean (as opposed to being spread over many orders of magnitude), then the normal distribution tends to be a much better model (as indicated by such results as the central limit theorem). If instead the various samples of the statistics are highly correlated with each other, then other laws can arise (for instance, the eigenvalues of a random matrix, as well as many empirically observed matrices, are correlated to each other, with the behaviour of the largest eigenvalues being governed by laws such as the Tracy-Widom law rather than Zipf’s law, and the bulk distribution being governed by laws such as the semicircular law rather than the normal or Pareto distributions).

To illustrate these laws, let us take as a data set the populations of 235 countries and regions of the world in 2007 (using the CIA world factbook); I have put the raw data here. This is a relatively small sample (cf. my previous post), but is already enough to discern these laws in action. For instance, here is how the data set tracks with Benford’s law (rounded to three significant figures):

	Countries	Number	Benford prediction
1	Angola, Anguilla, Aruba, Bangladesh, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Chile, China, Christmas Island, Cook Islands, Cuba, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Gabon, (The) Gambia, Greece, Guam, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mexico, (Federated States of) Micronesia, Nauru, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Pakistan, Portugal, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Serbia, Swaziland, Syria, Timor-Leste (East-Timor), Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Tuvalu, (U.S.) Virgin Islands, Wallis and Futuna, Zambia, Zimbabwe	59 ()	71 ()
2	Armenia, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Cote d’Ivoire, French Polynesia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Indonesia, Iraq, Jamaica, (North) Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mayotte, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia Norfolk Island, Palau, Peru, Romania, Saint Martin, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Svalbard, Taiwan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Yemen	44 ()	41 ()
3	Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, (The) Bahamas, Belize, Brunei, Canada, (Rep. of the) Congo, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Iceland, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Maldives, Mauritania, Monaco, Morocco, Oman, (Occupied) Palestinian Territory, Panama, Poland, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Uganda, United States of America, Uruguay, Western Sahara	29 ()	29 ()
4	Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma (Myanmar), Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Faroe Islands, Georgia, Ireland, (South) Korea, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, New Zealand, Norway, Pitcairn Islands, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Suriname, Tanzania, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates	27 ()	22 ()
5	(Macao SAR) China, Cocos Islands, Denmark, Djibouti, Eritrea, Finland, Greenland, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Montserrat, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, Togo, Turkmenistan	16 ()	19 ()
6	American Samoa, Bermuda, Bhutan, (Dem. Rep. of the) Congo, Equatorial Guinea, France, Guernsey, Iran, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Marshall Islands, Montenegro, Paraguay, Sierra Leone, Thailand, United Kingdom	17 ()	16 ()
7	Bahrain, Bulgaria, (Hong Kong SAR) China, Comoros, Cyprus, Dominica, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Israel, (Isle of) Man, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Helena, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey	17 ()	14 ()
8	Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Austria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, Haiti, Holy See (Vatican City), Northern Mariana Islands, Qatar, Seychelles, Vietnam	15 ()	12 ()
9	Belarus, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Grenada, Guinea, Hungary, Jersey, Philippines, Somalia, Sweden	11 ()	11 ()

Here is how the same data tracks Zipf’s law for the first twenty values of , with the parameters and (selected by log-linear regression), again rounding to three significant figures:

	Country	Population	Zipf prediction	Deviation from prediction
1	China	1,330,000,000	1,280,000,000
2	India	1,150,000,000	626,000,000
3	USA	304,000,000	412,000,000
4	Indonesia	238,000,000	307,000,000
5	Brazil	196,000,000	244,000,000
6	Pakistan	173,000,000	202,000,000
7	Bangladesh	154,000,000	172,000,000
8	Nigeria	146,000,000	150,000,000
9	Russia	141,000,000	133,000,000
10	Japan	128,000,000	120,000,000
11	Mexico	110,000,000	108,000,000
12	Philippines	96,100,000	98,900,000
13	Vietnam	86,100,000	91,100,000
14	Ethiopia	82,600,000	84,400,000
15	Germany	82,400,000	78,600,000
16	Egypt	81,700,000	73,500,000
17	Turkey	71,900,000	69,100,000
18	Congo	66,500,000	65,100,000
19	Iran	65,900,000	61,600,000
20	Thailand	65,500,000	58,400,000

As one sees, Zipf’s law is not particularly precise at the extreme edge of the statistics (when is very small), but becomes reasonably accurate (given the small sample size, and given that we are fitting twenty data points using only two parameters) for moderate sizes of .

This data set has too few scales in base to illustrate the Pareto distribution effectively – over half of the country populations are either seven or eight digits in that base. But if we instead work in base , then country populations range in a decent number of scales (the majority of countries have population between and ), and we begin to see the law emerge, where is now the number of digits in binary, the best-fit parameters are and :

	Countries with binary digit populations	Number	Pareto prediction
31	China, India	2	1
30	”	2	2
29	“, United States of America	3	5
28	“, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia	9	8
27	“, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Germany, Egypt, Turkey	17	15
26	“, (Dem. Rep. of the) Congo, Iran, Thailand, France, United Kingdom, Italy, South Africa, (South) Korea, Burma (Myanmar), Ukraine, Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Sudan, Tanzania, Poland, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria	36	27
25	“, Canada, Afghanistan, Uganda, Nepal, Peru, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Malaysia, (North) Korea, Ghana, Yemen, Taiwan, Romania, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Australia, Cote d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Syria, Cameroon	58	49
24	“, Netherlands, Chile, Kazakhstan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Malawi, Ecuador, Niger, Guatemala, Senegal, Angola, Mali, Zambia, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, Tunisia, Czech Republic, Rwanda, Serbia, Chad, Hungary, Guinea, Belarus, Somalia, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Sweden, Haiti, Burundi, Benin	91	88
23	“, Austria, Azerbaijan, Honduras, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Israel, El Salvador, (Hong Kong SAR) China, Paraguay, Laos, Sierra Leone, Jordan, Libya, Papua New Guinea, Togo, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Denmark, Slovakia, Kyrgyzstan, Finland, Turkmenistan, Norway, Georgia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Central African Republic, Moldova, Costa Rica	123	159

Thus, with each new scale, the number of countries introduced increases by a factor of a little less than , on the average. This approximate doubling of countries with each new scale begins to falter at about the population (i.e. at around million), for the simple reason that one has begun to run out of countries. (Note that the median-population country in this set, Singapore, has a population with binary digits.)

These laws are not merely interesting statistical curiosities; for instance, Benford’s law is often used to help detect fraudulent statistics (such as those arising from accounting fraud), as many such statistics are invented by choosing digits at random, and will therefore deviate significantly from Benford’s law. (This is nicely discussed in Robert Matthews’ New Scientist article “The power of one“; this article can also be found on the web at a number of other places.) In a somewhat analogous spirit, Zipf’s law and the Pareto distribution can be used to mathematically test various models of real-world systems (e.g. formation of astronomical objects, accumulation of wealth, population growth of countries, etc.), without necessarily having to fit all the parameters of that model with the actual data.

Being empirically observed phenomena rather than abstract mathematical facts, Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution cannot be “proved” the same way a mathematical theorem can be proved. However, one can still support these laws mathematically in a number of ways, for instance showing how these laws are compatible with each other, and with other plausible hypotheses on the source of the data. In this post I would like to describe a number of ways (both technical and non-technical) in which one can do this; these arguments do not fully explain these laws (in particular, the empirical fact that the exponent in Zipf’s law or the Pareto distribution is often close to is still quite a mysterious phenomenon), and do not always have the same universal range of applicability as these laws seem to have, but I hope that they do demonstrate that these laws are not completely arbitrary, and ought to have a satisfactory basis of mathematical support.

Small samples, and the margin of error

The U.S. presidential election is now only a few weeks away.  The politics of this election are of course interesting and important, but I do not want to discuss these topics here (there is not exactly a shortage of other venues for such a discussion), and would request that readers refrain from doing so in the comments to this post.  However, I thought it would be apropos to talk about some of the basic mathematics underlying electoral polling, and specifically to explain the fact, which can be highly unintuitive to those not well versed in statistics, that polls can be accurate even when sampling only a tiny fraction of the entire population.

Take for instance a nationwide poll of U.S. voters on which presidential candidate they intend to vote for.  A typical poll will ask a number of randomly selected voters for their opinion; a typical value here is .  In contrast, the total voting-eligible population of the U.S. – let’s call this set – is about 200 million.  (The actual turnout in the election is likely to be closer to 100 million, but let’s ignore this fact for the sake of discussion.)  Thus, such a poll would sample about 0.0005% of the total population – an incredibly tiny fraction.  Nevertheless, the margin of error (at the 95% confidence level) for such a poll, if conducted under idealised conditions (see below), is about 3%.  In other words, if we let denote the proportion of the entire population that will vote for a given candidate , and let denote the proportion of the polled voters that will vote for , then the event will occur with probability at least 0.95.  Thus, for instance (and oversimplifying a little – see below), if the poll reports that 55% of respondents would vote for A, then the true percentage of the electorate that would vote for A has at least a 95% chance of lying between 52% and 58%.  Larger polls will of course give a smaller margin of error; for instance the margin of error for an (idealised) poll of 2,000 voters is about 2%.

I’ll give a rigorous proof of a weaker version of the above statement (giving a margin of error of about 7%, rather than 3%) in an appendix at the end of this post.  But the main point of my post here is a little different, namely to address the common misconception that the accuracy of a poll is a function of the relative sample size rather than the absolute sample size, which would suggest that a poll involving only 0.0005% of the population could not possibly have a margin of error as low as 3%.  I also want to point out some limitations of the mathematical analysis; depending on the methodology and the context, some polls involving 1000 respondents may have a much higher margin of error than the idealised rate of 3%.

The Dantzig selector: Statistical estimation when p is much larger than n

Over two years ago, Emmanuel Candés and I submitted the paper “The Dantzig selector: Statistical estimation when is much
larger than ” to the Annals of Statistics. This paper, which appeared last year, proposed a new type of selector (which we called the Dantzig selector, due to its reliance on the linear programming methods to which George Dantzig, who had died as we were finishing our paper, had contributed so much to) for statistical estimation, in the case when the number of unknown parameters is much larger than the number of observations. More precisely, we considered the problem of obtaining a reasonable estimate for an unknown vector of parameters given a vector of measurements, where is a known predictor matrix and is a (Gaussian) noise error with some variance . We assumed that the predictor matrix X obeyed the restricted isometry property (RIP, also known as UUP), which roughly speaking asserts that has norm comparable to whenever the vector is sparse. This RIP property is known to hold for various ensembles of random matrices of interest; see my earlier blog post on this topic.

Our selection algorithm, inspired by our previous work on compressed sensing, chooses the estimated parameters to have minimal norm amongst all vectors which are consistent with the data in the sense that the residual vector obeys the condition

, where (1)

(one can check that such a condition is obeyed with high probability in the case that , thus the true vector of parameters is feasible for this selection algorithm). This selector is similar, though not identical, to the more well-studied lasso selector in the literature, which minimises the norm of penalised by the norm of the residual.

A simple model case arises when n=p and X is the identity matrix, thus the observations are given by a simple additive noise model . In this case, the Dantzig selector is given by the hard soft thresholding formula

The mean square error for this selector can be computed to be roughly

(2)

and one can show that this is basically best possible (except for constants and logarithmic factors) amongst all selectors in this model. More generally, the main result of our paper was that under the assumption that the predictor matrix obeys the RIP, the mean square error of the Dantzig selector is essentially equal to (2) and thus close to best possible.

After accepting our paper, the Annals of Statistics took the (somewhat uncommon) step of soliciting responses to the paper from various experts in the field, and then soliciting a rejoinder to these responses from Emmanuel and I. Recently, the Annals posted these responses and rejoinder on the arXiv: