Dear CHANCE Colleagues,

It has been a fun year for us, serving as executive editors of CHANCE, and we are excited about this final issue for 2023. In particular, we are proud to publish four articles in this special theme issue about human trafficking.

The theme arose from a National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) Ingram Olkin Forum organized by David Banks titled “Statistical Methods for Combatting Human Trafficking,” held virtually on March 15, 2023. Speakers included Banks (Duke University), Margaret Henderson (University of North Carolina), Nancy E. Hagan (North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission), Tyler McCormick (University of Washington), Rowland Seymour (University of Birmingham), and Bernard Silverman (Oxford University). See the event website for more details.

Henderson and Hagan set the stage in their article “Four Strategies for Human Trafficking Research,” where they describe strategies typically used to understand the nature and scope of human trafficking: criminal justice, public health, human rights, and economic analysis.

This is followed by Seymour and Silverman’s article, answering the question, “How can we estimate modern slavery globally?” The estimation of prevalence has been an important part of the process of bringing the crime of modern slavery and human trafficking to wide public and policy attention. Given the challenges in estimating the prevalence of modern slavery, the authors discuss some aspects of the estimation process and reflect on issues it raises for statistical analysis.

Next, we have Banks and Emmanuel Mokel writing about “Multiple Systems Estimation and Human Trafficking,” a statistical method using the overlap between samples to make inferences about the size of the larger population. The authors discuss how this approach is far more robust to the biases and complexities of practical applications.

The final themed article, by McCormick and colleagues, “Respondent-driven sampling: An overview in the context of human trafficking,” provides an overview of the sampling approach and discusses it in the context of trafficking.

The NISS supports these forums to honor the memory of Ingram Olkin (1924–2016), a professor emeritus and chair of statistics and education at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “Each forum focuses on a current societal issue that might benefit from new or renewed attention from the statistical community and brings the latest innovations in statistical methodology and data science into new research and public policy collaborations.” Past events focused on gun violence, advancing demographic equity with privacy-preserving methodologies, and unplanned clinical trial disruptions.

Proposals for future forums are welcome; see the website for details. The next forum looks at the police use of force, and we hope to have a special themed issue of CHANCE about that topic next year, so stay tuned and keep reading CHANCE!

There are also three general-topic articles in this issue. First is one by Stephanie Shipp (University of Virginia, Biocomplexity Institute) and your two CHANCE executive editors, about making ethical decisions. The authors convey why and how it is sometimes hard to do, hence the title, “Making Ethical Decisions is Hard!” This article shows how the Academic Data Science Alliance’s Data Science Ethos can be combined with the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice through the lens of a real-world application.

The next article, “I Can See Clearly Now, the Data’s Shown: Data Visualization Insights from Podcast Contest,” is an update of a CHANCE article published in the previous issue. It describes the data set used in a recent Stats+Stories podcast data visualization contest. It explains how the data set was made available for classroom use, reports on the five finalists for the data visualization contest, and reveals the winner.

The last article, “A Conversation with Ray Waller,” is another of our CHANCE memorials. This one honors statistical colleague Ray A. Waller, who had a distinguished statistical career, and two ASA awards recognizing excellence in teaching are named for him. His son Lance recorded an interview with him in 2019, which is transcribed in this issue. Ray Waller died at his home on December 28, 2022.

Rounding things out, we have four fascinating columns in this issue. The History Chronicles column is by guest author Altea Lorenzo-Arribas, who is a socio-economic statistician and secretary of the History of Statistics Section of the Royal Statistical Society. She illustrates how “a few enlightened statistical minds played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in achieving women’s universal suffrage worldwide.”

Continuing the history theme is the article in the Visual Revelations column. In 1878, French polymath Étienne-Jules Marey published a book titled La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales, which was the first of its kind. The introduction, where Marey helps us understand how visualization took root as a crucial tool documenting the empirical world, was translated for this column.

Steve Ziliak contemplates the “Rhetoric of Statistics” in the One Thing About column, and makes us think more about the commonplace phrase, “Let the data speak for themselves.”

Finally, we know CHANCE readers are always looking to expand their knowledge, and the Book Review by Christian Roberts has just the thing for you. See the column for a detailed and insightful review of Probabilistic numerics: Computation as machine learning by Philipp Henning, Michael Osborne, and Hans Kersting.

We hope you will be inspired after reading this issue from cover to cover and motivated to submit an article to CHANCE next year. See the website for more information about submitting to CHANCE.

Wendy Martinez and Donna LaLonde

Back to Top