After a sunny weekend to unpack and unwind, I am now back to my normal schedule, on my way to Paris-Dauphine for an R (second-chance) exam. Except for confusing my turn signal for my wiper, thanks to two weeks of intensive driving in four Australian states!, things are thus back to “normal”, meaning that I [...]
I.B.M. Mainframe Evolves to Serve the Digital World: I don’t know. The word “mainframe” to me sounds rather antiquated. Executives said the company’s new line of mainframe computers can tackle any trend in corporate computing, from the cloud t...
At the Republican Convention, the Words Being Used [nytimes.com] is an interactive word cloud map that visualizes how frequently speakers at the Republican National Convention have used specific words and phrases. The data is continuously updated ba...
Jeff’s post about the deterministic statistical machine got me thinking a bit about the cost of data analysis. The cost of data analysis these day is in many ways going up. The data being collected are getting bigger and more complex. Analyzing t...
Jeff’s post about the deterministic statistical machine got me thinking a bit about the cost of data analysis. The cost of data analysis these day is in many ways going up. The data being collected are getting bigger and more complex. Analyzing t...
I’ve had a couple of email conversations in the past couple days on dependence in multivariate prior distributions. Modeling the degrees of freedom and scale parameters in the t distribution First, in our Stan group we’ve been discussing the choice of priors for the degrees-of-freedom parameter in the t distribution. I wrote that also there’s [...]
I work in an environment dominated by SAS, and I am looking to integrate R into our environment. Why would I want to do such a thing? First, I do not want to get rid of SAS. That would not only take away most of our investment in SAS training and hirin...
Magic squares are cool. Algorithms that create magic squares are even cooler. You probably remember magic squares from your childhood: they are n x n matrices that contain the numbers 1,2,...,n2 and for which the row sum, column sum, and the sum of both diagonals are the same value. There are many [...]
In our article How robust is logistic regression? we pointed out some basic yet deep limitations of the traditional full-step Newton-Raphson or Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares methods of solving logistic regression problems (such as in R‘s standard glm() implementation). In fact in the comments we exhibit a well posed data fitting problem that can not [...] Related posts: How robust is logistic regression? The equivalence of logistic regression and maximum…
Today Scott Chamberlain tweeted asking for a better/faster solution to building an m x n matrix with randomly assigned 0/1. He already had a working version: Now, I’m the first to acknowledge that I’ve never got the ‘apply’ family of … Continue reading →
The Internet Map [internet-map.net] encompasses over 350,000 websites based in 196 countries, which are clustered according to about 2 million mutual links between them. Developed by a small team of seemingly (Singapore based?) Russian enthusiasts, th...
Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter: Much genetic research is predicated on study subjects being anonymous, but increasingly researchers are discovering things these subjects, or their relatives, might need or like to know.
Many graph experts disagree with Darryl Huff’s argument that the scales of all graphs must begin at zero. I discuss why the rule for bar graphs may differ from that for line graphs.
About a year ago I wrote a post about producing scatterplot matrices in R. These are handy for quickly getting a sense of the correlations that exist in your data. Recently someone asked me to pull out some relevant statistics (correlation coefficient ...
Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing: Amazon is quietly upending the world of business computing through its cloud operations, a vast resource that gives companies heavy computing power without the baseline costs.
In honor of the Olympics, I got my butt over to the park and played run-around-the-house chess for the first time ever. As was discussed in the comments thread awhile ago, there seem to be three possible ways to play Turing chess: 1. You make your move and run around the house. The other player [...]
Robins and Wasserman Respond to a Nobel Prize Winner James Robins and Larry Wasserman Note: This blog post is written by two people and it is cross-posted at Normal Deviate and Three Toed Sloth. Chris Sims is a Nobel prize winning economist who is well known for his work on macroeconomics, Bayesian statistics, vector autoregressions [...]
This week I’m in Cyprus attending the COMPSTAT2012 conference. There’s been the usual interesting collection of talks, and interactions with other researchers. But I was struck by two side comments in talks this morning that I’d like to mention. Stephen Pollock: Don’t imagine your model is the truth Actually, Stephen said something like “economists (or was it econometricians?) have a bad habit of imagining their models are true”. He gave…
My C-oriented Stan collaborators have convinced me to use underscore (_) rather than dot (.) as much as possible in expressions in R. For example, I can name a variable n_years rather than n.years. This is fine. But I’m getting annoyed because I need to press the shift key every time I type the underscore. [...]
The German news magazine Der Spiegel published a series of articles [1, 2] around career developments. The stories suggest that career aspirations of young professionals today are somewhat different to those of previous generations in Germany. Apparen...
Attention conservation notice: Posted because I got tired of repeating it to nervous new graduate students. You are not beginning graduate school at a research university. (Any resemblance to how I treat the undergrads in ADA is entirely deliberate.)...
Introduction to the course: statistical programming for autonomy, honesty, and clarity of thought. The functional programming idea: write code by building functions to transform input data into desired outputs. Basic data types: Booleans, integers, ...
Something has happened to give statistics a bad name, when it is an inherently fascinating and relevant subject. You know what I mean – you tell people that you teach, or work in or study statistics and they either depart, … Continue reading →
