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CCMS Colloquium: Harrison Li (HMC)
February 27 @ 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
CCMS Colloquium invites you to a talk by Harrison Li (HMC)
Title: Precise analysis of blocked randomized experiments
Abstract: I recently finished a multi-year project with collaborators analyzing a blocked randomized experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of a government job training program for unemployment insurance (UI) recipients in Rhode Island. In presenting the results, I will focus on some methodological considerations that arose organically in this context. I will start by providing an introduction to the potential outcomes framework in causal inference and show how it enables us to formulate a precise mathematical description of what exactly it is we want to estimate when running a randomized experiment. Then, we will see some principled and less principled methods for performing this estimation in the setting of a block randomized experiment. Some directions for ongoing and future research will be discussed.
Bio: Harrison Li is in his first year as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. He comes to Claremont after finishing his graduate studies in statistics at Stanford University in 2025, and previously worked full time as a quantitative trader on Wall Street. His research interests center around variance reduction in randomized experiments through experimental design and/or novel estimation procedures. He is also very passionate about developing sound statistical methodology in the service of other disciplines, including climate science, agronomy, and economics, and about exposing more students to the mathematical aspects of probability and statistics.
