I’m only skeptical on priors, because 50 percent is an unusually huge infant mortality drop. I can’t off the top of my head think of another right now like that measured in the last few years. I agree it feels plausible though and like your say 1000 dollars buys as lot. In the public health field we hardly ever see those kind of numbers even for expensive targeted interventions.
It’s reasonable to be somewhat skeptical based on priors given the statistical power of this (very worthy and interesting!) study? I didn’t dig deeper, but back of the envelope if you draw from 10000 iid households with an infant each and a 4% probability you’d expect a standard deviation around 0.2%, so there’s not much room for slicing the data a lot finer or additional correlation creeping in without a decent amount of sampling error. Obviously, with smarter analysis you can do a bit better and it’s hard and expensive to get more data, but it’s easy to believe the results are biased upwards a bit. The study is a great step in the right direction.
I’m only skeptical on priors, because 50 percent is an unusually huge infant mortality drop. I can’t off the top of my head think of another right now like that measured in the last few years. I agree it feels plausible though and like your say 1000 dollars buys as lot. In the public health field we hardly ever see those kind of numbers even for expensive targeted interventions.
It’s reasonable to be somewhat skeptical based on priors given the statistical power of this (very worthy and interesting!) study? I didn’t dig deeper, but back of the envelope if you draw from 10000 iid households with an infant each and a 4% probability you’d expect a standard deviation around 0.2%, so there’s not much room for slicing the data a lot finer or additional correlation creeping in without a decent amount of sampling error. Obviously, with smarter analysis you can do a bit better and it’s hard and expensive to get more data, but it’s easy to believe the results are biased upwards a bit. The study is a great step in the right direction.