Ecological Inference
New Methodological Strategies

This book, first published in 2004, presents social scientific methods for drawing inferences about individuals based on aggregate data.

Gary King (Edited by), Ori Rosen (Edited by), Martin A. Tanner (Edited by)

9780521835138, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 September 2004

432 pages, 451 b/w illus. 54 tables
26 x 18.5 x 3.3 cm, 0.93 kg

Drawing upon the explosion of research in the field, a diverse group of scholars surveys strategies for solving ecological inference problems, the process of trying to infer individual behavior from aggregate data. The uncertainties and information lost in aggregation make ecological inference one of the most difficult areas of statistical inference, but these inferences are required in many academic fields, as well as by legislatures and the Courts in redistricting, marketing research by business, and policy analysis by governments. This wide-ranging collection of essays, first published in 2004, offers many important contributions to the study of ecological inference.

Introduction: information in ecological inference: an introduction Gary King, Ori Rosen and Martin A. Tanner
Part I: 1. Prior and likelihood choices in the analysis of ecological data Jonathan C. Wakefield
2. Information in aggregate data David G. Steel, Eric J. Beh and Raymond Lourenco Chambers
3. Using ecological inference for contextual research: when aggregation bias is the solution as well as the problem D. Stephen Voss
Part II: 4. Extending King's ecological inference model to multiple elections using Markov chain Monte Carlo Jeffry B. Lewis
5. Ecological regression and ecological inference Bernard Grofman and Samuel Merrill
6. Using prior information to aid ecological inference: a Bayesian approach J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht
7. An information theoretic approach to ecological estimation and inference George G. Judge, Douglas J. Miller and Wendy K. Tam Cho
8. Ecological panel inference from repeated cross sections Rob Eisinga, Ben Pelzer and Philip Hans B. F. Franses
Part III: 9. Multi-party split-ticket voting estimation as an ecological inference problem Kenneth R. Benoit, Michael Laver and Daniela Giannetti
10. Ecological inference in the presence of temporal dependence Kevin M. Quinn
11. A spatial view of the ecological inference problem Carol A. Gotway and Linda J. Young
12. Places and relationships in ecological inference: uncovering contextual effects through a geographically weighted autoregressive model Ernesto Calvo and Marcelo Escolar
13. Ecological inference incorporating spatial dependence Sebastien Haneuse and Jonathan C. Wakefield
Part IV: 14. A common framework for ecological inference in epidemiology, political science and sociology Ruth E. Salway and Jonathan C. Wakefield
15. A structured comparison of the Goodman regression, the truncated normal, and the binomial-beta hierarchical methods for ecological inference Rogério Silva de Mattos and Álvaro Veiga
16. A comparison of the numerical properties of ei methods Micah Altman, Jeff Gill and Michael P. McDonald.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Social research & statistics [JHBC]