## Interview with C. Titus Brown – Computational biologist and open access champion

August 17, 2012
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C. Titus Brown  C. Titus Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. He develops computational software for next generation sequencing and the author of the blog, “Livin...

## An update on visualizing Bayesian updating

August 17, 2012
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A while ago I wrote this post with some R code to visualize the updating of a beta distribution as the outcome of Bernoulli trials are observed. The code provided a single plot of this process, with all the curves overlayed on top of one another. Then John Myles White (co-author of Machine Learning for

## E.S. Pearson’s Statistical Philosophy

August 16, 2012
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Egon Sharpe (E.S.) Pearson’s birthday was August 11.  This slightly belated birthday discussion is directly connected to the question of the uses to which frequentist methods may be put in inquiry.  Are they limited to supplying procedures which will not err too frequently in some vast long run? Or are these long run results of [...]

## P-values Gone Wild and Multiscale Madness

August 16, 2012
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I came across a very interesting paper by E. J. Masicampo and Daniel Lalande called A peculiar prevalence of p values just below .05. The link is here. (I saw it referenced at marginal revolution. 1. Peculiar Prevalence I recommend reading the paper to get the full details. The quick summary is that they collected [...]

## Google’s Visual Approach to Local Search

August 16, 2012
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I very much like Google's visual presentation of certain answers to local search queries that involve regions of space. 'Pittsburgh' '98115' 'Fife'

## Statistics in Focus #2

August 16, 2012
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‘The International Year of Statistics (“Statistics2013″) is a worldwide celebration and recognition of the contributions of statistical science. Through the …Continue reading »

## “Real data can be a pain”

August 16, 2012
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Michael McLaughlin sent me the following query with the above title. Some time ago, I [McLaughlin] was handed a dataset that needed to be modeled. It was generated as follows: 1. Random navigation errors, historically a binary mixture of normal and Laplace with a common mean, were collected by observation. 2. Sadly, these data were [...]

August 16, 2012
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EurozoneBy: Eurasia ReviewAugust 16, 2012(CORDIS) — The increasing use of ICT for business, leisure and public services is leading to the accumulation of mountains of structured and in many cases unstructured data. But this so-called ‘big data...

## Extract the lower triangular elements of a matrix

August 16, 2012
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It is common to want to extract the lower or upper triangular elements of a matrix. For example, if you have a correlation matrix, the lower triangular elements are the nontrivial correlations between variables in your data. As I've written before, you can use the VECH function to extract the [...]

## INLA: Bayes goes to Norway

August 16, 2012
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INLA is not the Norwegian answer to ABBA; that would probably be a-ha. INLA is the answer to ‘Why do I have enough time to cook a three-course meal while running MCMC analyses?”. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA) is based … Continue reading →

## What does a generalized linear model do?

August 15, 2012
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What does a generalized linear model do? R supplies a modeling function called glm() that fits generalized linear models (abbreviated as GLMs). A natural question is what does it do and what problem is it solving for you? We work some examples and place generalized linear models in context with other techniques.For predicting a categorical [...] Related posts: How robust is logistic regression? Modeling Trick: Impact Coding of Categorical Variables…

## How I think about mixture models

August 15, 2012
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Larry Wasserman refers to finite mixture models as “beasts” and writes jokes that they “should be avoided at all costs.” I’ve thought a lot about mixture models, ever since using them in an analysis of voting patterns that was published in 1990. First off, I’d like to say that our model was useful so I’d [...]

## Statisticians need marketing

August 15, 2012
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I can't think of too much I would disagree with in Simply Statistics's posting on Statistics/statisticians need better marketing. I'll elaborate on a couple of points: We should be more “big tent” about statistics. ASA President Robert Rodriguez ...

## Probit Models with Endogeneity

August 15, 2012
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$Probit Models with Endogeneity$

Dealing with endogeneity in a binary dependent variable model requires more consideration than the simpler continuous dependent variable case. For some, the best approach to this problem is to use the same methodology used in the continuous case, i.e. 2 stage least squares. Thus, the equation of interest becomes a linear probability model (LPM). The […]

## The Statistical Sleuth (second edition) in R

August 15, 2012
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For those of you who teach, or are interested in seeing an illustrated series of analyses, there is a new compendium of files to help describe how to fit models for the extended case studies in the Second Edition of the Statistical Sleuth: A Course in...

## Good Scientist Badge of Approval?

August 14, 2012
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In an attempt to fix the problem of “unreal” results in science some have started a “reproducibility initiative”. Think of the incentive for being explicit about how the results were obtained the first time….But would researchers really pay to have their potential errors unearthed in this way?  Even for a “good scientist” badge of approval? [...]

## Statistics/statisticians need better marketing

August 14, 2012
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Statisticians have not always been great self-promoters. I think in part this comes from our tendency to be arbiters rather than being involved in the scientific process. In some ways, I think this is a good thing. Self-promotion can quickly become re...

## 1.5 million people were told that extreme conservatives are happier than political moderates. Approximately .0001 million Americans learned that the opposite is true.

August 14, 2012
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A Brooks op-ed in the New York Times (circulation approximately 1.5 million): People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. . . . none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers . . . Jay Livingston on his blog (circulation approximately 0 (rounding to the nearest million)), giving data from the 2009-2010 General [...]

## Health IT Dashboard from the Office of the US National Coordinator for Health IT

August 14, 2012
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Check Out How HITECH Programs Are HelpingFrom:  http://dashboard.healthit.gov/Are you interested in better understanding health IT and the transformative changes that electronic health/medical records are having in our nation's health care system?...

## Storytelling: Minard vs. Nightingale

August 14, 2012
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There is a lot of confusion about storytelling and what tells a story. I have argued previously that stories do not tell themselves. Rather, we tell the stories given raw materials. Some of these materials lend themselves better to ad-hoc storytelling, so we tend to say that they actually tell the story, when it’s really us who do it. Exhibit A: Minard A particular example of the easy storytelling genre…

## The essence of a handwritten digit

August 14, 2012
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If you haven’t yet discovered the competitive machine learning site kaggle.com, please do so now. I’ll wait. Great – so, you checked it out, fell in love and have made it back. I recently downloaded the data for the getting started competition. It consists of 42000 labelled images (28×28) of hand written digits 0-9. The

August 14, 2012
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Today I want to highlight a whitepaper about Adaptive Asset Allocation by Butler, Philbrick and Gordillo and the discussion by David Varadi on the robustness of parameters of the Adaptive Asset Allocation algorithm. In this post I will follow the steps of the Adaptive Asset Allocation paper, and in the next post I will show [...]

## Guest Blog: Avoid Applicable Math

August 13, 2012
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To help teach the skill of abstracting in Math students are given “word puzzles” which ultimately lead to a single “right” answer. The students are required to work out how to put the data from question together correctly the find … Continue reading →