## The Econometrics of Temporal Aggregation – I

July 5, 2014
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Yesterday, I gave the A. W. H. Phillips Memorial Lecture at the 55th Conference of the New Zealand Association of Economists. The conference was held at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and it was a great success.More on the conference...

## RDataMining group having 6000 members today

July 5, 2014
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RDataMining Group: http://group.rdatamining.com Twitter: @RDataMining Website: http://www.RDataMining.com The RDataMining group has 6000 members today, 5 July 2014. Created in August 2011, this group has developed into a big community with 6000 member within three years. Since its creation, many members … Continue reading →

## Guest post: PNAS, facebook and the ethics of online experimentation

July 4, 2014
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This is a guest blog post by Gerry Markopoulos. I'm posting it because I think it is an important topic that deserves wider discussion.Recently, an article was published in the prestigious journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (...

## Dimensionless analysis as applied to swimming!

July 4, 2014
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We have no fireworks-related posts for July 4th but at least we have an item that’s appropriate for the summer weather. It comes from Daniel Lakeland, who writes: Recently in one of your blog posts (“priors I don’t believe”) there was a discussion in which I was advocating the use of dimensional analysis and dimensionless […] The post Dimensionless analysis as applied to swimming! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…

## Currency Exchange Rate Forecasting with ARIMA and STL

July 3, 2014
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I have made an example of time series forecasting with R, demonstrating currency exchange rate forecasting with the ARIMA and STL models. The example is easy to understand and follow. R source files are provided to run the example. The … Continue reading →

## “The great advantage of the model-based over the ad hoc approach, it seems to me, is that at any given time we know what we are doing.”

July 3, 2014
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The quote is from George Box, 1979. And this: Please can Data Analysts get themselves together again and become whole Statisticians before it is too late? Before they, their employers, and their clients forget the other equally important parts of the job statisticians should be doing, such as designing investigations and building models? I actually […] The post “The great advantage of the model-based over the ad hoc approach, it…

## Flowing Data: Data science, big data, and statistics – all together now

July 3, 2014
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From: http://flowingdata.com/2014/07/02/data-science-big-data-and-statistics-all-together-now/JULY 2, 2014  |  STATISTICSTerry Speed, a emeritus professor in statistics at University of California at Berkeley, gave an excellent talk...

## The Oracle (7)

July 3, 2014
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We're now down to 8 teams left in the World Cup. Interestingly, despite a pretty disappointing display by some of the (more or less rightly so) highly rated teams, such as Spain, Italy, Portugal or England, European sides are exactly 50% of the lot. Gi...

## Using Biplots to Map Cluster Solutions

July 2, 2014
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FactoMineR is a quick and easy R package for generating biplots, such as the following plot showing the columns as arrows with the rows to be added later as points. As you might recall from a previous post, a biplot maps a data matrix by plotting both ...

## “Being an informed Bayesian: Assessing prior informativeness and prior–likelihood conflict”

July 2, 2014
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Xiao-Li Meng sends along this paper (coauthored with Matthew Reimherr and Dan Nicolae), which begins: Dramatically expanded routine adoption of the Bayesian approach has substantially increased the need to assess both the confirmatory and contradictory information in our prior distribution with regard to the information provided by our likelihood function. We propose a diagnostic approach […] The post “Being an informed Bayesian: Assessing prior informativeness and prior–likelihood conflict” appeared first…

## Short course: Bayesian methods in health economics

July 2, 2014
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Chris, Richard and I tested this last March in Canada (see also here) and things seem to have gone quite well. So we have decided to replicate the experiment (so that we can get a bigger sample size!) and do the short course this coming November (...

## Pairwise comparisons of a data vector

July 2, 2014
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A SAS customer showed me a SAS/IML program that he had obtained from a book. The program was taking a long time to run on his data, which was somewhat large. He was wondering if I could identify any inefficiencies in the program. The first thing I did was to […]

## 2014 UseR conference, days 1-2

July 2, 2014
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I’m at UCLA for the UseR Conference. I attended once before, and I really enjoyed it. And I’m really enjoying this one. I’m learning a ton, and I find the talks very inspiring. In my comments below, I give short shrift to some speakers (largely by not having attended their talks), and I’m critical in […]

## recycling accept-reject rejections (#2)

July 1, 2014
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$recycling accept-reject rejections (#2)$

Following yesterday’s post on Rao’s, Liu’s, and Dunson’s paper on a new approach to intractable normalising constants, and taking advantage of being in Warwick, I tested the method on a toy model, namely the posterior associated with n Student’s t observations with unknown location parameter μ and a flat prior, which is “naturally” bounded by […]

## The Econometrics Bard Strikes Again!

July 1, 2014
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Guy Judge (now retired from the University of Portsmouth in the U.K.) has been back at it again in the past couple of days.In recent years Guy has shared several original econometrics poems/songs with us through his Guy's Econometrics Blog.The latest t...

## %HPGLIMMIX SAS macro is available online at JSS website

July 1, 2014
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My paper "%HPGLIMMIX: A High-Performance SAS Macro for GLMM Estimation" is now available at Journal of Statistical Software website @here.SAS macro and code can also be found there. If you use it, please kindly send me an email so that I know my work i...

July 1, 2014
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Facebook data scientists are being blasted for a social psychology experiment they ran in 2012 in which they varied the amount of positive/negative content exposed to users in newsfeeds and measured whether this affected the positive/negative content posted by those users. (link to WSJ report; link to paper) I'm perplexed by the reaction. Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow calls it "likely illegal", who links to James Grimmelmann, a law professor. Slate…

## Frequentist inference only seems easy

July 1, 2014
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Two of the most common methods of statistical inference are frequentism and Bayesianism (see Bayesian and Frequentist Approaches: Ask the Right Question for some good discussion). In both cases we are attempting to perform reliable inference of unknown quantities from related observations. And in both cases inference is made possible by introducing and reasoning over … Continue reading Frequentist inference only seems easy → Related posts: Bayesian and Frequentist Approaches:…

## “Who’s bigger”—the new book that ranks every human on Wikipedia—is more like Bill Simmons than Bill James

July 1, 2014
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I received a copy of “Who’s Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank,” by Steven Skiena, a computer scientist at Stony Brook University, and Charles Ward, and engineer at Google. Here’s the blurb I gave the publisher: Skiena and Ward provide a numerical ranking for the every Wikipedia resident who’s ever lived. What a great idea! […] The post “Who’s bigger”—the new book that ranks every human on Wikipedia—is more like…

## The missing Brazil effect, and BYOC charts

July 1, 2014
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Announcement: I'm giving a free public lecture on telling and finding stories via data visualization at NYU on 7/15/2014. More information and registration here. *** The Economist states the obvious, that the current World Cup is atypically high-scoring (or poorly...

## Last chance to register for the R in Insurance conference

July 1, 2014
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The registration for the 2nd R in Insurance conference at Cass Business School London will close this Friday, 4 July. The programme includes talks from international practitioners and leading academics, see below. For more details and registration visi...

## Mathematics and Applied Statistics Lesson of the Day – The Geometric Mean

$Mathematics and Applied Statistics Lesson of the Day – The Geometric Mean$

Suppose that you invested in a stock 3 years ago, and the annual rates of return for each of the 3 years were 5% in the 1st year 10% in the 2nd year 15% in the 3rd year What is the average rate of return in those 3 years? It’s tempting to use the arithmetic mean, […]

## Some ironies in the ‘replication crisis’ in social psychology (4th and final installment)

July 1, 2014
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There are some ironic twists in the way social psychology is dealing with its “replication crisis”, and they may well threaten even the most sincere efforts to put the field on firmer scientific footing–precisely in those areas that evoked the call for a “daisy chain” of replications. Two articles, one from the Guardian (June 14), and a second from […]