StatsBlogs - Statistics Blogs

Alexandre Grothendieck, book review, Books, comics, François Schuiten, Gödel Escher and Bach, graphic novel, Jacques Tardi, José Muñoz, Kids, Kingman's coalescent, logicomix, NCIS, Nicolas Bourbaki, Persi Diaconis, Princeton University Press, Statistics, University life

prime suspects [book review]

by xi'an • August 5, 2019

I was contacted by Princeton University Press to comment on the comic book/graphic novel Prime Suspects (The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations), by Andrew Granville (mathematician) & Jennifer Granville (writer), and Robert Lewis (illustrator), and they sent me the book. I am not a big fan of graphic book entries to mathematical even less than […]

Bayesian Statistics, Statistics

Holes in Bayesian Philosophy: My talk for the philosophy of statistics conference this Wed.

by Andrew • August 5, 2019

4pm Wed 7 Aug 2019 at Virginia Tech (via videolink): Holes in Bayesian Philosophy Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University Every philosophy has holes, and it is the responsibility of proponents of a philosophy to point out these problems. Here are a few holes in Bayesian data analysis: (1) […]

Math, Python, Statistics

Angles in the spiral of Theodorus

by John • August 5, 2019

The previous post looked at how to plot the spiral of Theodorus shown below. We stopped the construction where we did because the next triangle to be added would overlap the first triangle, which would clutter the image. But we could certainly have kept going. If we do keep going, then the set of hypotenuse […]

Math, Statistics

How to plot the spiral of Theodorus

by John • August 4, 2019

You may have seen the spiral of Theodorus. It sticks a sequence of right triangles together to make a sort of spiral. Each triangle has a short side of length 1, and the hypotenuse of each triangle becomes the long leg of the next triangle as shown below. How would you plot this spiral? At […]

ABC, Books, g-and-k distributions, importance sampling, latent variable models, NP-complete problem, permanent of a matrix, pseudo-marginal MCMC, recycling, Statistics, University life, University of Warwick

unbiased product of expectations

by xi'an • August 4, 2019

While I was not involved in any way, or even aware of this research, Anthony Lee, Simone Tiberi, and Giacomo Zanella have an incoming paper in Biometrika, and which was partly written while all three authors were at the University of Warwick. The purpose is to design an efficient manner to approximate the product of […]

Economics, Statistics

A weird new form of email scam

by Andrew • August 4, 2019

OK, we all know that spam we get—sometimes spoofed as if from our own email address!—telling us to click on some link. Scene 1 The other day I got a new sort of spam. It was from a colleague, the subject line was “Are you available in campus,” and the email went like this: On […]

Bayesian time series analysis, COPSS Award, Denver, IMS Medallion, JSM 2019, open source, RStudio, Statistics

R wins COPSS Award!

by xi'an • August 3, 2019

Hadley Wickham from RStudio has won the 2019 COPSS Award, which expresses a rather radical switch from the traditional recipient of this award in that this recognises his many contributions to the R language and in particular to RStudio. The full quote for the nomination is his “influential work in statistical computing, visualisation, graphics, and […]

Multilevel Modeling, Statistics

Allowing intercepts and slopes to vary in a logistic regression: how does this change the ROC curve?

by Andrew • August 3, 2019

Jonathan Hughes writes: I am an engineering doctoral student. As part of my dissertation I’m proposing a mode of adaptation for a predictive system to individual subgroup specific streams of data which come each from a specific subgroup of a mixture population distribution. As part of the proposal presentation someone referenced your work and believed […]

Cryptography, Math, Statistics

Encryption as secure as factoring

by John • August 3, 2019

RSA encryption is based on the assumption that factoring large integers is hard. However, it’s possible that breaking RSA is easier than factoring. That is, the ability to factor large integers is sufficient for breaking RSA, but it might not be necessary. Two years after the publication of RSA, Michael Rabin created an alternative that […]

Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine, hiking, Japan, jatp, Kii Hantō, Kumano Kodō, Kyoto, Mountains, onsen, Osaka, Osaka University, pictures, pilgrimage, Statistics, torii, Travel, University life, vacations

off to Osaka

by xi'an • August 2, 2019

Today, I am off to Japan to visit Kengo Kamatani at Osaka University (where I will give a seminar on Tuesday) for a week and then for two weeks of vacation hiking the Kumano Kodō, a network of ancient pilgrimage routes in the Kii peninsula, south of Osaka. (Presumably with little access to the Internet […]

Causal Inference, Statistical computing, Statistics

Causal inference workshop at NeurIPS 2019 looking for submissions

by Andrew • August 2, 2019

Nathan Kallus writes: I wanted to share an announcement for a causal inference workshop we are organizing at NeurIPS 2019. I think the readers of your blog would be very interested, and we would be eager to have them interact/attend/submit. And here it is: The NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on “Do the right thing”: machine learning […]

Statistics, Zombies

This one goes in the Zombies category, for sure.

by Andrew • August 2, 2019

Paul Alper writes: I was in my local library and I came across this in Saturday’s WSJ: The Math Behind Successful Relationships Nearly 30 years ago, a mathematician and a psychologist teamed up to explore one of life’s enduring mysteries: What makes some marriages happy and some miserable? The psychologist, John Gottman, wanted to craft […]

Statistics, Stephen Senn

S. Senn: Red herrings and the art of cause fishing: Lord’s Paradox revisited (Guest post)

by Mayo • August 2, 2019

Stephen Senn Consultant Statistician Edinburgh Background Previous posts[a],[b],[c] of mine have considered Lord’s Paradox. To recap, this was considered in the form described by Wainer and Brown[1], in turn based on Lord’s original formulation: A large university is interested in investigating the effects on the students of the diet provided in the university dining halls […]

Math, Statistics

Accelerating convergence with Aitken’s method

by John • August 2, 2019

The previous post looked at Euler’s method for accelerating the convergence of a slowly converging alternating series. Both hypotheses are necessary. The signs must alternate between terms, and applying the method to a series that is already converging quickly can slow down convergence. This post looks at Aitken’s method for speeding up the convergence of […]

Causal Inference, Miscellaneous Statistics, Statistics

Causal Inference and Generalizing from Your Data to the Real World (my talk tomorrow, Sat., 6pm in Berlin)

by Andrew • August 2, 2019

For the Berlin Bayesians meetup, organized by Eren Elçi: Causal Inference and Generalizing from Your Data to the Real World Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University Learning from data involves three stages of extrapolation: from sample to population, from treatment group to control group, and from measurement to the […]

Computing, Math, Statistics

Accelerating an alternating series

by John • August 2, 2019

The most direct way of computing the sum of an alternating series, simply computing the partial sums in the terms get small enough, may not be the most efficient. Euler figured this out in the 18th century. For our demo we’ll evaluate the Struve function defined by the series Note that the the terms in […]

agence CAB, Books, CASD, CREST, Cryptography, encryption, ENSAE, genes, INSEE, Massachusetts, Nature, NYT, pictures, reproducibility, Statistics, University life

on anonymisation

by xi'an • August 1, 2019

An article in the New York Times covering a recent publication in Nature Communications on the ability to identify 99.98% of Americans from almost any dataset with fifteen covariates. And mentioning the French approach of INSEE, more precisely CASD (a branch of GENES, as ENSAE and CREST to which I am affiliated), where my friend […]

data science, IDE, integrated development environment, Opinion, PyCharm, Python, Statistics

PyCharm Video Review

by John Mount • August 1, 2019

My basic video review of the PyCharm integrated development environment for Python with Anaconda and Jupyter/iPython integration. I like the IDE extensions enough to pay for them early in my evaluation. Highly recommended for data science projects, at…

Multilevel Modeling, Statistics, Zombies

The garden of forking paths

by Andrew • August 1, 2019

Bert Gunter points us to this editorial: So, researchers using these data to answer questions about the effects of technology [screen time on adolescents] need to make several decisions. Depending on the complexity of the data set, variables can be statistically analysed in trillions of ways. This makes almost any pattern of results possible. As […]

curse of dimensionality, finite variance, importance sampling, infinite variance estimators, Pareto smoothed importance sampling, Statistics

improved importance sampling via iterated moment matching

by xi'an • July 31, 2019

Topi Paananen, Juho Piironen, Paul-Christian Bürkner and Aki Vehtari have recently arXived a work on constructing an adapted importance (sampling) distribution. The beginning is more a review than a new contribution, covering the earlier work by Vehtari, Gelman and Gabri (2017): estimating the Pareto rate for the importance weight distribution helps in assessing whether or […]

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