## Spite.

December 24, 2013
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Congress. Wait, before you lose your lunch, bear with me. This dysfunctional legislative body has been making headlines in the news recently. And when Congress is mentioned, rarely, if ever, is it of the positive persuasion. The shutdown, for example...

## NYT version of birthday graph

December 24, 2013
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They didn’t have room for all four graphs of the time-series decomposition so they just displayed the date-of-year graph: They rotated so the graph fit better on the page. The rotation worked for me, but I was a bit bummed that that they put the title and heading of the graph (“The birthrate tends to […]The post NYT version of birthday graph appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…

## Estimating and summarizing inference for hierarchical variance parameters when the number of groups is small

December 24, 2013
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Chris Che-Castaldo writes: I am trying to compute variance components for a hierarchical model where the group level has two binary predictors and their interaction. When I model each of these three predictors as N(0, tau) the model will not converge, perhaps because the number of coefficients in each batch is so small (2 for […]The post Estimating and summarizing inference for hierarchical variance parameters when the number of groups…

## How fair is White Elephant?

December 24, 2013
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Welcome to analyze stuff! For our first post, I wanted to reflect on the time of year; after all, ‘tis the season for hams and yams, caroling and sledding, and of course gifts! One popular party gift exchange game is the White Elephant, where each person brings a wrapped (typically regifted or otherwise odd-ball) gift, and then picks one in order with the option of “stealing” another unwrapped gift. Relative…

## Sentence Drawing: Part II

December 24, 2013
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In a recent blog post I introduced Stefanie Posavec‘s Sentence Drawings. We created this ggplot2 rendition: We left off weighing the aesthetics of the Sentence Drawing with information of quality visualizations. I asked others to think of ways to display … Continue reading →

## Imprecise machines mess with history

December 24, 2013
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The mass media continues to gloss over the imprecision of machines/algorithms. Here is another example I came across the other day. In conversation, the name Martin Van Buren popped up. I was curious about this eighth President of the United States. What caught my eye in the following Google search result (right panel) is his height: Mr. Van Buren was very short, only 5 feet tall. I was about to…

## Simulation III: Monte Carlo and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (Introduction to Statistical Computing)

December 23, 2013
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Lecture 16: The Monte Carlo principle for numerical integrals: write your integral as an expectation, take a sample. Examples. Importance sampling: draw from a distribution other than the one you really are want, then weight the sample values. Mark...

## Bayes, 250 years ago

December 23, 2013
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Exactly 250 years ago, on December 23rd, while some people were still shopping to get presents for their kids, Mr Price took some time to write a letter to the Royal Society of London, He sent an essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances, writen by an old friend of his (who just died), Mr. Bayes, A few days ago, Stephen Stigler came in Montréal to give a…

## Scala as a platform for statistical computing and data science

December 23, 2013
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There has been a lot of discussion on-line recently about languages for data analysis, statistical computing, and data science more generally. I don’t really want to go into the detail of why I believe that all of the common choices are fundamentally and unfixably flawed – language wars are so unseemly. Instead I want to […]

## Scala as a platform for statistical computing and data science

December 23, 2013
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There has been a lot of discussion on-line recently about languages for data analysis, statistical computing, and data science more generally. I don’t really want to go into the detail of why I believe that all of the common choices are fundamentally and unfixably flawed – language wars are so unseemly. Instead I want to […]

## Doing Yeoman’s work.

December 23, 2013
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They work hard for their money. Or, maybe they just work for their money. Either way, members of Congress get paid. There are many ways to measure the amount of work congressional members do. One way is by looking at the number of Bill's they pass pe...

## I hate this stuff

December 23, 2013
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Aki pointed me to this article. I’m too exhausted to argue all this in detail yet one more time, but let me just say that I hate this stuff for the reasons given in Section 5 of this paper from 1998 (based on classroom activities from 1994). I’ve hated this stuff for a long time. […]The post I hate this stuff appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…

## Holiday Haze

December 23, 2013
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Your dedicated blogger is about to vanish in the holiday haze, presumably stumbling back sometime early in the new year.Random thought: Obviously I guessed that I'd enjoy writing this blog, or I wouldn't have started, but I had no idea how truly satisf...

## One is enough

December 23, 2013
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If you blink, you might think the following graphic came from USA Today. It turns out the Wall Street Journal has adopted USA-Today-style graphics. The chart about missions to the moon (together with two other similar ones) showed up this...

## New book release: Data Mining Applications with R

December 23, 2013
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Book title: Data Mining Applications with R Editors: Yanchang Zhao, Yonghua Cen Publisher: Elsevier Publish date: December 2013 ISBN: 978-0-12-411511-8 Length: 514 pages URL: http://www.rdatamining.com/books/dmar An edited book titled Data Mining Applications with R was released in December 2013, which … Continue reading →

## Further adventures with higher moments

December 23, 2013
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Additional views of the stability of skewness and kurtosis of equity portfolios. Previously A post called “Four moments of portfolios” introduced the idea of looking at the stability of the mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of portfolios through time. That post gave birth to a presentation at the London Quant Group. That talk gave birth … Continue reading →

## Ben Shneiderman’s Treemap Art

December 23, 2013
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Art imitates life, and sometimes art is inspired by research. Ben Shneiderman’s Treemap Art is unique in that it is the researcher himself (with Kazi Minhazur Rahman), rather than an artist, who has created the art pieces. Now that I think about it, treemaps have a history of aesthetic improvements. The original treemap layout, now […]

## Donner

December 22, 2013
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Autant mettre les choses au clair assez rapidement. Dans ce billet, je ne pensais pas parler du sens mystique de Noël, mais plutôt revenir sur l’utilisation du participe passé féminin de ce verbe, souvent utilisé au pluriel: les données. Les données ont avant tout un sens ‘scientifique’, représentant des informations fournies qui vont permettre de donner une solution à un problème. Plus généralement, une donnée – que l’on pourrait assimiler…

## The kluges of today are the textbook solutions of tomorrow.

December 22, 2013
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From a response on the Stan help list: Yes, indeed, I think it would be a good idea to reduce the scale on priors of the form U(0,100) or N(0,100^2). This won’t solve all problems but it can’t hurt. If the issue is that the variance parameter can be very small in the estimation, yes, […]The post The kluges of today are the textbook solutions of tomorrow. appeared first on…

## Judgmental forecasting experiment

December 22, 2013
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The Centre for Forecasting at Lancaster University is conducting some research on judgmental forecasting and model selection. They hope to compare the performance of judgmental model selection with statistical model selection, in order to learn how to best design forecasting support systems. They would like forecasting students, practitioners and researchers to participate, and are offering £50 Amazon Gift Cards as prizes. Here is a brief description from Fotios Petropoulos: We…

## MCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #14)

December 21, 2013
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We are quite glad to announce that, thanks to the support of several publishers (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, and Springer-Verlag), there will be book prizes for both poster nights at MCMSki IV ! I was reminded of this possibility during O-Bayes 2013 and those publishers reacted both quickly and positively to my request (and […]

## Chasing the noise

December 21, 2013
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Fabio Rojas writes: After reading the Fowler/Christakis paper on networks and obesity, a student asked why it was that friends had a stronger influence on spouses. In other words, if we believe the F&C paper, they report that your friends (57%) are more likely to transmit obesity than your spouse (37%) (see page 370). This […]The post Chasing the noise appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

## 37% chance

December 21, 2013
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$n\times n$

I don’t know if you ever realized, before, but it is quite common to have 37% chance that something happened (or actually “not happened” if we want to be more rigorous). For instance, consider a  grid, and draw  points randomly (and uniformely). Then, around 37% cells are empty. Or if you consider a cell, on that grid, there is 37% chance, that the cell is empty. You can look, on the…