September 17, 2021
In Fall 2021, the Center for Social and Behavioral Science hosted a Methods Series virtual workshop, Machine Learning for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, presented by Dr. Fred Oswald.
This workshop was a hands-on experience where Dr. Fred Oswald demonstrated the use of R and RStudio to conduct predictive modeling and clustering using machine learning algorithms. Participants explored available data sets, ran and discussed a few fundamental machine learning algorithms, and compared the performance of these machine learning model against traditional models.
Recordings
Introduction to Machine Learning
Regularized Regression Methods (Lasso, Elastic Net)
Tree-Based Methods (Random Forest, GBM)
Clustering Methods
Wrap-up, Other Methods, and Q&A
Workshop resources
Recommended readings
Do We Need Hundreds of Classifiers?
A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning
Prediction, Estimation, and Attribution
Construct Validation of Experimental Manipulations in Social Psychology
Meet the speaker, Dr. Fred Oswald
Dr. Fred Oswald is a professor and Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice University, in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University. As an industrial-organizational psychologist, his research, publications, and grants focus on measuring, modeling and predicting organizational and educational outcomes with individual differences measures (e.g., personality, motivation, knowledge, experience and ability). His methodological work in psychometrics, SEM, meta-analysis, multilevel modeling, and machine learning also serves this end. Currently, Fred serves as the Associate Editor of Journal of Applied Psychology, Associate Editor of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Sciences, Chair of the Board on Human-Systems Integration (BOHSI) within the National Academy of Sciences, Chair-Elect of the Board of Scientific Affairs (BSA) within APA, and Chair of the Open Science Methods (OSM) committee within APA. He is also the former president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), former Chair of APA’s Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessment (CPTA), former Associate Editor of six other journals (e.g., Psychological Methods, Journal of Management) and a fellow of APA (Div. 5, 8, 14), APS, and SIOP. Fred received his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1999.