ANCOVA — Bayesian Style
12 hours ago
Following the very positive reception of the previous article looking for to know if there may be a proportional difference between school sectors and post-secondary outcomes, let’s follow up with somewhat more. We stated that the modelling was not intended to be causal, and is merely descriptive. This was prefaced by saying that there could be quite a few aspects that one might consider in a causal model. Well it so happens a proxy measure exists, ICSEA or Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage.
Continuing on from the previous article, we’ll seek to explore if there may be a causal relationship between ICSEA across proportional outcomes by sector, amounting to a Bayesian ANCOVA workflow.
Background
Before jumping into the modelling, lets develop our causal model and understanding. ICSEA is a scale that identifies the socio-educational advantage of a faculty. It is a measure calculated by ACARA (Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority) that aspects in parents educational background and occupation, Aboriginal status of scholars and the geographic location of the varsity. The common value of ICSEA is about to 1000 with an ordinary deviation of 100, and hence higher ICSEA values check with schools with higher socio-educational advantage.
There are an enumerate variety of aspects that may affect student performance and outcomes. We’ve simplified to something more tangible below. Starting on the left hand side, we will reasonably expect a parents level of education to be an influence on their child’s personal ambitions, parental education will influence their salary, and hence what suburb they afford to live in, putting them proximal to varsities inside certain sectors. We’re going to reasonably assume that affluent areas have a greater mixture of Independent and Catholic schools ahead of Government schools. These are a number of fields and data…