Bücher der Reihe Elements in Quantitative and Computational Methods for the Social Sciences

Twitter presents an ideal combination of size, international reach, and data accessibility that make it a useful data source. Acquiring, cleaning, and analyzing these data, however, require new tools and processes. This Element introduces these methods and provides scripts and examples for downloading, processing, and analyzing Twitter data.

This Element discusses how shiny, an R package, can help instructors teach quantitative methods more effectively by way of interactive web apps. The interactivity increases instructors' effectiveness by making students more active participants in the learning process, allowing them to engage with otherwise complex material in an accessible way.

Dimension reduction offers researchers and scholars the ability to make complex, high dimensional data spaces simpler and more manageable. This Element offers readers a suite of modern unsupervised dimension reduction techniques to efficiently represent the original high dimensional data space in a simplified, lower dimensional subspace.

In discrete choice models the relationships between the independent variables and the choice probabilities are nonlinear, depending on both the value of the particular independent variable being interpreted and the values of the other independent variables. Thus, interpreting the magnitude of the effects (the "e;substantive effects"e;) of the independent variables on choice behavior requires the use of additional interpretative techniques. Three common techniques for interpretation are described here: first differences, marginal effects and elasticities, and odds ratios. Concepts related to these techniques are also discussed, as well as methods to account for estimation uncertainty. Interpretation of binary logits, ordered logits, multinomial and conditional logits, and mixed discrete choice models such as mixed multinomial logits and random effects logits for panel data are covered in detail. The techniques discussed here are general, and can be applied to other models with discrete dependent variables which are not specifically described here.