The Statistical Software Award: The Best Statistical Software Award recognizes individual(s) for developing statistical software that makes a significant research contribution.
2012 Statistical Software Winners: Walter Mebane (University of Michigan) and Jasjeet Sekhon (University of California, Berkeley) for "genoud: (Genetic Optimization using Derivatives).
Citation: The 2012 Society for Political Methodology Software Award goes to Walter Mebane and Jasjeet Sekhon for genoud (Genetic Optimization using Derivatives). This free software was created to help scholars with a range of difficult mathematical optimization problems that underlie the use of many advanced statistical models. A familiar example of such a task, commonly encountered in empirical studies of politics, is the maximization of a (log) likelihood to obtain parameter estimates for a statistical model. In certain circumstances---for example, when the likelihood is non-linear in the parameters---this operation may be literally impossible using standard methods available to political scientists --- 'canned' packages are unreliable when applied to these models and generally yield incorrect results. Specifically, rgenoud allows researchers to optimize functions that are discontinuous in their parameters, but allows for derivative information where appropriate in order to speed convergence. Its importance to our discipline may in part be inferred from the fact that other R packages used by political scientists, including methods for matching, surveys with anchors and factor analysis, all rely on its routines. It has also been used outside political science, with statistical applications to pharmacokinetics, and polymerase chain reactions, among others. The authors are particularly commended for their well-designed and engineered software, which was originally written in C, but was updated using C++, extended to support large-scale analysis using distributed computing clusters, and released as a full-featured R package. The selection committee was Curt Signorino, Micah Altman, Andrew Martin, and Arthur Spirling. Please join the committee and me in congratulating the programmers. (The prize will be formally awarded at the APSA 2012 Business Meeting of the Political Methodology Section.)
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Robert (Rob) J. Franzese, Jr.
Professor, Department of Political Science,
Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, I.S.R.,
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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President, The Society for Political Methodology
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Room 4246 Institute for Social Research
P.O. Box 1248 (for courier: 426 Thompson St.)
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248
office: 1-734-936-1850; fax: 1-734-764-3341
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~franzese
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