Ecological regression

From HandWiki
Short description: Statistical technique

Ecological regression is a statistical technique which runs regression on aggregates, often used in political science and history to estimate group voting behavior from aggregate data.[1]

For example, if counties have a known Democratic vote (in percentage) D, and a known percentage of Catholics, C, then running a linear regression of dependent variable D against independent variable C will give D = a + bC. If the regression gives D = .22 + .45C for example, then the estimated Catholic vote (C = 1) is 67% Democratic and the non-Catholic vote (C = 0) is 22% Democratic. The technique has been often used in litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to see how blacks and whites voted.[2]

See also

References

  1. Gelman, Andrew; Park, David K.; Ansolabehere, Stephen; Price, Phillip N.; Minnite, Lorraine C. (2001). "Models, assumptions and model checking in ecological regressions". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) 164 (1): 101–118. doi:10.1111/1467-985x.00190. ISSN 0964-1998. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/ecological.pdf. 
  2. Jacob S. Siegel (2002). Applied Demography: Applications to Business, Government, Law and Public Policy. Emerald Group. p. 557. ISBN 9780126418408. https://books.google.com/books?id=a5Ax1oRbkDMC&pg=PA557. 

Further reading