Aaronson, COLT, Bayesians and Frequentists I am reading Scott Aaronson’s book “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” which can be found here. The book is about computational complexity, quantum mechanics, quantum computing and many other things. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it. Much of the material on complexity classes is tough going but you […]
A few months ago I posted about John Ioannidis’ article called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Ioannidis is once again making news by publishing a similar article aimed at neuroscientists. This paper is called “Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience.” The paper is written by Button, Ioannidis, Mokrysz, […]
Data Science: The End of Statistics? As I see newspapers and blogs filled with talk of “Data Science” and “Big Data” I find myself filled with a mixture of optimism and dread. Optimism, because it means statistics is finally a sexy field. Dread, because statistics is being left on the sidelines. The very fact that […]
Super-efficiency: The Nasty, Ugly Little Fact I just read Steve Stigler’s wonderful article entitled: “The Epic Story of Maximum Likelihood.” I don’t know why I didn’t read this paper earlier. Like all of Steve’s papers, it is at once entertaining and scholarly. I highly recommend it to everyone. As the title suggests, the paper discusses […]
We uploaded a paper called Statistical Inference For Persistent Homology on arXiv. (I posted about topological data analysis earlier here.) The paper is written with Siva Balakrishnan, Brittany Fasy, Fabrizio Lecci, Alessandro Rinaldo and Aarti Singh. The basic idea is this. We observe data where and is supported on a set . We want to […]
In today’s New York Times, Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez correctly warn that … math can become a weapon that impedes justice and destroys innocent lives. They discuss Lucia de Berk, and Sally Clark, two unfortunate people who were convicted of crimes based on bogus statistical arguments. Statistician Richard Gill helped get de Berk’s conviction […]
Yesterday we were fortunate to have Brad Efron visit our department and gave a seminar. Brad is one of the most famous statisticians in the world and his contributions to the field of statistics are too numerous to list. Probably he is best known for: inventing the bootstrap, for starting the field of the geometry […]
It’s been said a million times and in a million places that a p-value is not the probability of given the data. But there is a different type of confusion about p-values. This issue arose in a discussion on Andrew’s blog. Andrew criticizes the New York times for giving a poor description of the meaning […]
No, not the store. I am referring to the gap between the invention of a method and the theoretical justification for that method. It is hard to quantify the gap because, for any method, there is always dispute about who invented (discovered?) it, and who nailed the theory. For example, maximum likelihood is usually credited […]
Christian has a fun post about the rise of the B-word (Bayesian). “Bayesian ” kills “frequentist.” Well, how about the other B-word, “Bootstrap.” Look at this Google-trends plot: The bootstrap demolishes Bayes! Actually, Christian’s post was tongue-in-cheek. As he points out, “frequentist” is … not a qualification used by frequentists to describe their methods. In […]
