The authors of the chapters in this volume hail from academic disciplines with markedly different substantive concerns. Indeed, we suspect that not many books have been written with contributions from political scientists, electrical engineers, economists, agricultural economists, geographers, statisticians, applied statisticians, mathematicians, public health researchers, biostatisticians, and computer scientists. Yet, while the substantive problems pursued by the diverse disciplinary origins of these researchers vary enormously, they all have a deep, if not widely recognized, methodological common ground. Although the style and terminology often obscure this fact, they all use roughly the same theories of inference and many of the same statistical methods. The subject of this book is ecological inference, the problem of reconstructing individual behavior from group-level data, which indeed turns out to be a key problem in all these fields, as well as a variety of others, which we were not able to include. Not only is ecological inference required in a growing number of applications, it has a large number of scholars working on the methods of ecological inference – now larger than at any time in history.

Because our work seems to have had a particularly visible role in the renewed interest in ecological inference, we found ourselves in a unique position of getting to know many otherwise unconnected scholars from this vast array of scholarly fields.