ISSN 1932-6157 (print) ISSN 1941-7330 (online) THE ANNALS of APPLIED STATISTICS AN OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS Special section in memory of Stephen E. Fienberg (1942–2016) AOAS Editor-in-Chief 2013–2015 Editorial......................................................................... iii OnStephenE.Fienbergasadiscussantandafriend................DONALD B. RUBIN 683 Statistical paradises and paradoxes in big data (I): Law of large populations, big data paradox, and the 2016 US presidential election . ......................XIAO-LI MENG 685 Hypothesis testing for high-dimensional multinomials: A selective review SIVARAMAN BALAKRISHNAN AND LARRY WASSERMAN 727 When should modes of inference disagree? Some simple but challenging examples D. A. S. FRASER,N.REID AND WEI LIN 750 Fingerprintscience.............................................JOSEPH B. KADANE 771 Statistical modeling and analysis of trace element concentrations in forensic glass evidence.................................KAREN D. H. PAN AND KAREN KAFADAR 788 Loglinear model selection and human mobility . ................ADRIAN DOBRA AND REZA MOHAMMADI 815 On the use of bootstrap with variational inference: Theory, interpretation, and a two-sample test example YEN-CHI CHEN,Y.SAMUEL WANG AND ELENA A. EROSHEVA 846 Providing accurate models across private partitioned data: Secure maximum likelihood estimation....................................JOSHUA SNOKE,TIMOTHY R. BRICK, ALEKSANDRA SLAVKOVIC´ AND MICHAEL D. HUNTER 877 Clustering the prevalence of pediatric chronic conditions in the United States using distributedcomputing.....................YUCHEN ZHENG AND NICOLETA SERBAN 915 Estimating large correlation matrices for international migration JONATHAN J. AZOSE AND ADRIAN E. RAFTERY 940 Tracking network dynamics: A survey using graph distances CLAIRE DONNAT AND SUSAN HOLMES 971 Bayesian propagation of record linkage uncertainty into population size estimation of humanrightsviolations........................................MAURICIO SADINLE 1013 Unique entity estimation with application to the Syrian conflict BEIDI CHEN,ANSHUMALI SHRIVASTAVA AND REBECCA C. STEORTS 1039 Adjusted regularization in latent graphical models: Application to multiple-neuron spike count data . .......GIUSEPPE VINCI,VALÉRIE VENTURA,MATTHEW A. SMITH AND ROBERT E. KASS 1068 Discovering political topics in Facebook discussion threads with graph contextualization YILIN ZHANG,MARIE POUX-BERTHE,CHRIS WELLS, KAROLINA KOC-MICHALSKA AND KARL ROHE 1096 continued Vol. 12, No. 2—June 2018 ISSN 1932-6157 (print) ISSN 1941-7330 (online) THE ANNALS of APPLIED STATISTICS AN OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS Continued from front cover Providing access to confidential research data through synthesis and verification: An application to data on employees of the U.S. federal government ANDRÉS F. BARRIENTOS,ALEXANDER BOLTON,TOM BALMAT, JEROME P. R EITER,JOHN M. DE FIGUEIREDO, ASHWIN MACHANAVAJJHALA,YAN CHEN, CHARLEY KNEIFEL AND MARK DELONG 1124 The interlocking world of surveys and experiments STEPHEN E. FIENBERG AND JUDITH M. TANUR 1157 Articles A testing based approach to the discovery of differentially correlated variable sets KELLY BODWIN,KAI ZHANG AND ANDREW NOBEL 1180 Biomarker assessment and combination with differential covariate effects and an unknown gold standard, with an application to Alzheimer’s disease ZHEYU WANG AND XIAO-HUA ZHOU 1204 Robust dependence modeling for high-dimensional covariance matrices with financial applications....................................ZHE ZHU AND ROY E. WELSCH 1228 Network-based feature screening with applications to genome data MENGYUN WU,LIPING ZHU AND XINGDONG FENG 1250 Covariate matching methods for testing and quantifying wind turbine upgrades YEI EUN SHIN,YU DING AND JIANHUA Z. HUANG 1271 Nonstationary modelling of tail dependence of two subjects’ concentration KSHITIJ SHARMA,VALÉRIE CHAVEZ-DEMOULIN AND PIERRE DILLENBOURG 1293 A spatially varying stochastic differential equation model for animal movement JAMES C. RUSSELL,EPHRAIM M. HANKS,MURALI HARAN AND DAV I D HUGHES 1312 Torus principal component analysis with applications to RNA structure BENJAMIN ELTZNER,STEPHAN HUCKEMANN AND KANTI V. M ARDIA 1332 Vol. 12, No. 2—June 2018 The Annals of Applied Statistics 2018, Vol. 12, No. 2, iii-x https://doi.org/10.1214/17-AOAS122ED © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2018 SPECIAL SECTION IN MEMORY OF STEPHEN E. FIENBERG (1942–2016) AOAS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 2013–2015 REFERENCES EROSHEVA,E.andSLAVKOVIC, A. (2017). Obituary: Stephen E. Fienberg 1942–2016. IMS Bulletin 46 4–5. KADANE, J. B. (2017). Stephen Fienberg 1942–2016. J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. A 180 927–928. MEJIA, R. (2017). Stephen E. Fienberg (1942–2016). Statistician who campaigned for better science in court. Nature 542 415. STRAF,M.L.andTANUR, J. M. (2013). A conversation with Stephen E. Fienberg. Statist. Sci. 28 447–463. MR3135541 The Annals of Applied Statistics 2018, Vol. 12, No. 2, 683–684 https://doi.org/10.1214/17-AOAS1131SF © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2018 ON STEPHEN E. FIENBERG AS A DISCUSSANT AND A FRIEND BY DONALD B. RUBIN Harvard University (emeritus), Tsinghua University and Temple University The Annals of Applied Statistics 2018, Vol. 12, No. 2, 685–726 https://doi.org/10.1214/18-AOAS1161SF © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2018 STATISTICAL PARADISES AND PARADOXES IN BIG DATA (I): LAW OF LARGE POPULATIONS, BIG DATA PARADOX, AND THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION1 BY XIAO-LI MENG Harvard University Statisticians are increasingly posed with thought-provoking and even paradoxical questions, challenging our qualifications for entering the statisti- cal paradises created by Big Data. By developing measures for data quality, this article suggests a framework to address such a question: “Which one should I trust more: a 1% survey with 60% response rate or a self-reported administrative dataset covering 80% of the population?” A 5-element Euler- formula-like identity shows that for any dataset of size n, probabilistic or not, the difference between the sample average Xn and the population aver- age XN is the product of three terms: (1) a data quality measure, ρR,X,the correlation between√Xj and the response/recording indicator Rj ;(2)adata quantity measure, (N − n)/n,whereN is the population size; and (3) a problem difficulty measure, σX, the standard deviation of X. This decompo- sition provides multiple insights: (I) Probabilistic sampling ensures high data −1/2 quality by controlling ρR,X at the level of N ; (II) When we lose this con- trol, the impact of N is no longer canceled by ρR,X, leading to a Law of Large Populations√ (LLP), that is,√ our estimation error, relative to the benchmarking rate 1/ n, increases with N; and (III) the “bigness” of such Big Data (for population inferences) should be measured by the relative size f = n/N, not the absolute size n; (IV) When combining data sources for population infer- ences, those relatively tiny but higher quality ones should be given far more weights than suggested by their sizes. Estimates obtained from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) of the 2016 US presidential election suggest a ρR,X ≈−0.005 for self-reporting to vote for Donald Trump. Because of LLP, this seemingly mi- nuscule data defect correlation implies that the simple sample proportion of the self-reported voting preference for Trump from 1% of the US eligible voters, that is, n ≈ 2,300,000, has the same mean squared error as the cor- responding sample proportion from a genuine simple random sample of size n ≈ 400, a 99.98% reduction of sample size (and hence our confidence). The CCES data demonstrate LLP vividly: on average, the larger the state’s voter populations, the further away the actual Trump vote shares from the usual 95% confidence intervals based on the sample proportions. This should re- mind us that, without taking data quality into account, population inferences with Big Data are subject to a Big Data Paradox: the more the data, the surer we fool ourselves. Key words and phrases. 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