Everyone Wants a Churn Model
Rarely do I ever get asked to make churn estimates for someone who needs to bring the full power of a proportional hazards model to bear. Besides, the person asking for churn estimates doesn’t actually want to know “what is the probability someone churns eventually?” (Spoiler: it’s 1.)
A Motivating Example
We were studying how microglia affect neuronal networks using a standard imaging experiment: 3 mice, 3 coverslips per condition, about 20 neurons measured per coverslip. Our question: Does LPS activation significantly increase PNA signal?
A while back, I wrote a short piece about planning scientific projects for New Science. The article explores systematic approaches to identifying impactful research questions and structuring PhD projects for maximum scientific contribution.
RU Kulkarni, CL Wang, CR Bertozzi
PLoS Computational Biology (2022)
While hierarchical experimental designs are near-ubiquitous in
neuroscience and biomedical research, researchers often do not
take the structure of their datasets into account while performing
statistical hypothesis tests. We present Hierarch, a Python package for
analyzing nested experimental designs. Using a combination of permutation
resampling and bootstrap aggregation, Hierarch can be used to
perform hypothesis tests that maintain nominal Type I error rates
and generate confidence intervals that maintain the nominal
coverage probability without making distributional assumptions
about the dataset of interest.