## Saturday Night Brainstorming and Task Forces: (2013) TFSI on NHST

January 20, 2013
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Saturday Night Brainstorming: The TFSI on NHST–reblogging with a 2013 update Each year leaders of the movement to reform statistical methodology in psychology, social science and other areas of applied statistics get together around this time for a brainstorming session. They review the latest from the Task Force on Statistical Inference (TFSI), propose new regulations [...]

## Participate in a short survey about the weight of evidence provided by statistics

January 20, 2013
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Richard Morey writes: Rink Hoekstra and I are undertaking some research to explore how people use classical statistical results to evaluate the weight of evidence. Bayesians often critique classical techniques for being difficult to interpret in terms of what scientists want to know, but there is clearly information in the statistics themselves. We wonder how [...]

## Bootstrapping and Subsampling: Part I

January 20, 2013
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$Bootstrapping and Subsampling: Part I$

BOOTSTRAPPING AND SUBSAMPLING: PART I Bootstrapping and subsampling are in the “amazing” category in statistics. They seem much more popular in statistics than machine learning for some reason. 1. The Bootstrap The bootstrap (a.k.a. the shotgun) was invented by Brad Efron. Here is how it works. We have data and we want a confidence interval [...]

## Weekend Reading – S&P 500 Visual History

January 20, 2013
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Michael Johnston at the ETF Database shared a very interesting post with me over the holidays. The S&P 500 Visual History – is an interactive post that shows the top 10 components in the S&P 500 each year, going back to 1980. On a different note, Judson Bishop contributed a plota.recession() function to add recession [...]

## Anthropocene Statistics

January 19, 2013
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Long statistical time series get a new name: Anthropocene Statistics. ‘The Anthropocene defines Earth’s most recent geological time period as …Continue reading »

## “Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy”

January 19, 2013
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Mark Palko writes: I can understand the appeal of the cutting edge. The new stuff is sexier. It gets people’s attention. The trouble is, those cutting edge studies often collapse under scrutiny. Some can’t be replicated. Others prove to be not that important. Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy. It doesn’t drive traffic. [...]

## A few things I learned…

January 19, 2013
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Here's a quick list:1. Un petit peu français; mostly, it's still guess-work and making up stuff; but I've also learned a few phrases and words. I kind of manage to go around and ask for directions or buy things in the shops. Sometimes I punch way abov...

## R package for Bayes factors

January 19, 2013
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Richard Morey writes: You and your blog readers may be interested to know that a we’ve released a major new version of the BayesFactor package to CRAN. The package computes Bayes factors for linear mixed models and regression models. Of course, I’m aware you don’t like point-null model comparisons, but the package does more than [...]

## Comparing online and in-class outcomes

January 18, 2013
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My colleague John McGready has just published a study he conducted comparing the outcomes of students in the online and in-class versions of his Statistical Reasoning in Public Health class that he teaches here in the fall. In this class the online … Continue reading →

## Statistics stories wanted

January 18, 2013
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Andrew Gelman is trying to collect 365 stories about life as a statistician: So here’s the plan. 365 of you write vignettes about your statistical lives. Get into the nitty gritty—tell me what you do, and why you’re doing it.…Read more ›

## How much can we learn from an empirical result? A Bayesian approach to power analysis and the implications for pre-registration.

January 18, 2013
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$How much can we learn from an empirical result? A Bayesian approach to power analysis and the implications for pre-registration.$

Just like a lot of political science departments, here at Rice a group of faculty and students meet each week to discuss new research in political methodology. This week, we read a new symposium in Political Analysis about the pre-registration of studies in political science. To briefly summarize, several researchers argued that political scientists should [...]

## Is it really true that only 8% of people who buy Herbalife products are Herbalife distributors?

January 18, 2013
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A reporter emailed me the other day with a question about a case I’d never heard of before, a company called Herbalife that is being accused of being a pyramid scheme. The reporter pointed me to this document which describes a survey conducted by “a third party firm called Lieberman Research”: Two independent studies took [...]

## Repeated Measures Workshop now with R and… maybe SAS

January 18, 2013
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My goal all along has been to offer all my stat workshops with support for multiple software packages. I’ve gotten further along with some of them than others, but I’m working on it. So I was pretty happy during the last Repeated Measures workshop when one of the participants, Dan Neal, mentioned he was working out all the exercises in R.

## “If scientists wrote horoscopes, this is what yours would say”

January 18, 2013
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David Hogg points to this excellent science-based news article by Martha Gill. It’s not about astrology at all; rather, Gill alludes to scientific findings correlating different attributes with time-of-year of birth. At least, I assume this is science-based. It’s possible that Gill is just making it all up (or, for that matter, that the author [...]

## Big data scams: skin cancer edition

January 18, 2013
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Big data is not about the amount of data. Big data is about the availability of data. And more and more, it is about people preying on consumer's desire for data. I hate to say it but data vendors run the risk of becoming new-age used-car salesmen. The Wall Street Journal hyped a research article about mobile apps that supposedly "detect skin cancer". (WSJ link, article link). While the tone…

## More on ROC/AUC

January 18, 2013
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A bit more on the ROC/AUC The receiver operating characteristic curve (or ROC) is one of the standard methods to evaluate a scoring system. Nina Zumel has described its application, but we would like to emphasize out some additional details. In my opinion while the ROC is a useful tool, the “area under the curve” [...] Related posts: “I don’t think that means what you think it means;” Statistics to…

## Uniform R code for opening, saving graphs in Windows and Mac OS

January 18, 2013
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A big frustration when trying to create R code that works across Windows and Mac OS is that the R commands for opening graphics windows, and for saving their contents, are different in the two operating systems. In Windows, the functions windows() and ...

## Uniform R code for opening, saving graphs in Windows and Mac OS

January 18, 2013
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A big frustration when trying to create R code for users of both Windows and Mac OS is that the R commands for opening graphics windows, and for saving their contents, are different in the two operating systems. In Windows, the functions windows() and ...

## If SPSS can factor analyze MaxDiff scores, why can’t R?

January 17, 2013
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Answer:  The variance-covariance matrix containing all the MaxDiff scores is not invertible.  R tells you that, either with an error message or a warning.  SPSS, at least earlier versions still in use, runs the factor analysis witho...

## Wanted: 365 stories of statistics

January 17, 2013
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The American Statistical Association has a blog called the Statistics Forum that I edit but haven’t been doing much with. Originally I thought we’d get a bunch of bloggers and have a topic each week or each month and get discussions from lots of perspectives. But it was hard to get people to keep contributing, [...]

## Two free online courses starting soon: Data Analysis (with R) and Social Network Analysis

January 17, 2013
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There are two online courses starting soon on Coursera, which are free to register. 1. Data Analysis (with R) It is a 8-week online course starting on Jan 22nd 2013 <https://www.coursera.org/course/dataanalysis>. This course is an applied statistics course focusing on … Continue reading →

## The Tao of Statistics

January 17, 2013
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This is the third that I’m reading The Tao of Statistics: A Path to Understanding (With No Math)  by Dana K. Keller. Of course, it is not entirely because the book has “Tao” in its title. As the title suggests, there is absolutely no math in the book. This nice little book opens each chapter with […]