Alex Stephenson

PhD Student

University of California, Berkeley

Biography

I am a PhD Student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. My primary research interests are military organizations, the determinants of political violence, non-state actors, and causal inference. I am also interested in creating tools to make software easier to use for non-technical political scientists.

Recent Posts

Simulating Football Recruiting Evaluations with R

R is great for running quick simulations. Using a running example of college football recruit rankings, I show how we can leverage the …

Last updated on Jun 24, 2019 5 min read R

OLS Estimation by "Hand" in R

A common programming assignment when learning regression is to calculate OLS estimators by hand. In this post, I show exactly how to …

Last updated on Jun 20, 2019 8 min read R

Learning R: Dealing Playcards

Introduction There are lots of benefits to learning a computer language, even if only learning enough to make yourself dangerous to …

Last updated on Jun 2, 2019 6 min read R

Randomization Inference: A Simple Example

Randomization Inference is a non-parametric method for calculating p-values for hypothesis tests. This post provides a simple example …

Last updated on Jun 2, 2019 3 min read R

Using pdftools to Extract Vote Data

Introduction Suppose you are a concerned citizen who would like to know how voters in a state voted. Perhaps you are a voter in a state …

Last updated on Jun 2, 2019 4 min read R