## The Use of Sampling Weights in Bayesian Hierarchical Models for Small Area Estimation

December 19, 2014
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All this discussion of plagiarism is leaving a bad taste in my mouth (or, I guess I should say, a bad feeling in my fingers, given that I’m expressing all this on the keyboard) so I wanted to close off the workweek with something more interesting. I happened to come across the above-titled paper by […] The post The Use of Sampling Weights in Bayesian Hierarchical Models for Small Area…

## Defense by escalation

December 19, 2014
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Basbøll has another post regarding some copying-without-attribution by the somewhat-famous academic entertainer Slavoj Zizek. In his post, Basbøll links to theologian and professor Adam Kotsko (cool: who knew there were still theologians out and about in academia?) who defends Zizek, in part on the grounds that Zizek’s critics were being too harsh. Kotsko writes of […] The post Defense by escalation appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…

## Interview with Emily Oster

December 19, 2014
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Emily Oster is an Associate Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a frequent and highly respected contributor to 538 where she brings clarity to areas of interest to parents, pregnant woman, and the general public where empirical research is conflicting or difficult to interpret. She is also the author of the popular new

## The Geometry of Classifiers

December 19, 2014
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As John mentioned in his last post, we have been quite interested in the recent study by Fernandez-Delgado, et.al., “Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?” (the “DWN study” for short), which evaluated 179 popular implementations of common classification algorithms over 120 or so data sets, mostly from the UCI … Continue reading The Geometry of Classifiers → Related posts: Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier…

December 18, 2014
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Editor's Note: This is a repost of a previous post on our blog from 2012. The repost is inspired by similar issues with statistical illiteracy that are coming up in allergy screening and pregnancy screening.  I just was doing my morning reading of a few news sources and stumbled across this Huffington Post article talking about

## Message to Booleans: It’s an additive world, we just live in it

December 18, 2014
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Boolean models (“it’s either A or (B and C)”) seem to be the natural way that we think, but additive models (“10 points if you have A, 3 points if you have B, 2 points if you have C”) seem to describe reality better—at least, the aspects of reality that I study in my research. […] The post Message to Booleans: It’s an additive world, we just live in it…

## %SVD macro with BY-Processing

December 18, 2014
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For the Regularized Discriminant Analysis Cross Validation, we need to compute SVD for each pair of $$(\lambda, \gamma)$$, and the factorization result will be feed to the downdating algorithm to obtain leave one out variance-covariance matrix \(\hat{\...

## Hey, I just wrote my April Fool’s post!

December 17, 2014
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(scheduled to appear in a few months, of course). I think you’ll like it. Or hate it. Depending on who you are. The post Hey, I just wrote my April Fool’s post! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

## Wegman Frey Hauser Weick Fischer Dr. Anil Potti Stapel comes clean

December 17, 2014
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Thomas Leeper points me to Diederik Stapel’s memoir, “Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud,” translated by Nick Brown and available online for free download. The post Wegman Frey Hauser Weick Fischer Dr. Anil Potti Stapel co...

## End-of-Semester Econometrics Examination

December 17, 2014
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My introductory graduate econometrics class has just finished up. The students sat the final examination yesterday. They did really well!If you'd like to try your hand, you can find the exam. here.© 2014, David E. Giles

## A non-comprehensive list of awesome things other people did in 2014

December 17, 2014
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Editor's Note: Last year I made a list off the top of my head of awesome things other people did. I loved doing it so much that I'm doing it again for 2014. Like last year, I have surely missed awesome things people have done. If you know of some, you should make your own list or

## Statistics tutorials at PyCon 2015

December 17, 2014
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I am happy to announce that I will offer two statistics tutorials at PyCon 2015 on April 9 in Montreal.  In the morning session I am teaching Bayesian Statistics Made Simple, which I have taught several times before, including the last three PyCon...

## I’d like to see a preregistered replication on this one

December 17, 2014
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Under the heading, “Results too good to be true,” Lee Sechrest points me to this discussion by “Neuroskeptic” of a discussion by psychology researcher Greg Francis of a published (and publicized) claim by biologists Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler that “Parental olfactory experience [in mice] influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations.” That’s a […] The post I’d like to see a preregistered replication on this one appeared first…

## Self-similar structures from Kronecker products

December 17, 2014
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I recently posted an article about self-similar structures that arise in Pascal's triangle. Did you know that the Kronecker product (or direct product) can be used to create matrices that have self-similar structure? The basic idea is to start with a 0/1 matrix and compute a sequence of direct products […]

## New R package for electricity forecasting

December 17, 2014
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Shu Fan and I have developed a model for electricity demand forecasting that is now widely used in Australia for long-term forecasting of peak electricity demand. It has become known as the “Monash Electricity Forecasting Model”. We have decided to release an R package that implements our model so that other people can easily use it. […]

## Announcing Kent Staley’s new book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (CUP)

December 17, 2014
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Kent Staley has written a clear and engaging introduction to PhilSci that manages to blend the central key topics of philosophy of science with current philosophy of statistics. Quite possibly, Staley explains Error Statistics more clearly in many ways than I do in his 10 page section, 9.4. CONGRATULATIONS STALEY* You can get this book for free […]

## Announcing Kent Staley’s new book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (CUP)

December 17, 2014
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Kent Staley has written a clear and engaging introduction to PhilSci that manages to blend the central key topics of philosophy of science with current philosophy of statistics. Quite possibly, Staley explains Error Statistics more clearly in many ways than I do in his 10 page section, 9.4. CONGRATULATIONS STALEY* You can get this book for free […]

## Lazy(?)

December 16, 2014
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It's nearly the Christmas break and as I was writing the previous post (on our Workshop on cost-effectiveness thresholds), I just noticed the post-counter in the blog archive. While the decrease in the number of posts from 2012 to 2013 was minimal (98 ...

## NICE and the cost-effectiveness thresholds: Can good intentions compensate for bad practice?

December 16, 2014
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That's the title of the workshop we've held at UCL yesterday (I'd mentioned it in a previous post). I think it went remarkably well (OK $-$ as I'm the organiser, I may be over-enthusiastic, but I really think it was a very good day!). Despite the fact ...

## Expectation propagation as a way of life

December 16, 2014
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Aki Vehtari, Pasi Jylänki, Christian Robert, Nicolas Chopin, John Cunningham, and I write: We revisit expectation propagation (EP) as a prototype for scalable algorithms that partition big datasets into many parts and analyze each part in parallel to perform inference of shared parameters. The algorithm should be particularly efficient for hierarchical models, for which the […] The post Expectation propagation as a way of life appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…

## Notes from the Kölner R meeting, 12 December 2014

December 16, 2014
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Last week's Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended so far, and it was a remarkable event - I believe not a single line of R code was shown. Still, it was an R user group meeting with two excellent talks, and you will understand shortly why ...

## Damn, I was off by a factor of 2!

December 16, 2014
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I hate when that happens. Demography is tricky. Oh well, as they say in astronomy, who cares, it was less than an order of magnitude! The post Damn, I was off by a factor of 2! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Scien...

## Learning R: Live Webinar, Interactive Self-Paced, or Site Visit?

December 15, 2014
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My recent blog post, Why R is Hard to Learn, must have hit a nerve as it was read by over 6,000 people in its first two days online.  If you’re using R to augment your work in SAS, SPSS … Continue reading →