... or to be more precise, what's up with experimental social psychology? A number of high profile cases of suspected (in some cases admitted) fraud have been highlighted in psychology recently - my own discipline - but they've (nearly all arisen in ...
I've been tracking Google's local search experience for a while (I work in Bing's competing local search product). Since February 2012, I've noticed only three variants or changes to the way in which local search results are presented on the...
The plotPost() function, which plots histograms of MCMC chains annotated with HDI and other info, was changed a few weeks ago. plotPost() now returns summary information about the chain instead of summary information about the histogram. A reader...
Dan Kahan writes on what seems to be the topic of the week: In reflecting on Lehrer, I [Kahan] have to wonder why the sanction is so much more severe — basically career “death penalty” subject to parole [I think he means "life imprisonment" --- ed.], I suppose, if he manages decades of “good behavior” [...]
I discuss my ideas about a linear models class, emphasizing building a model from substantive ideas and drawing conclusions from the model.
I’ve just finished another reviewer report for a journal, and yet again I’ve had to make comments about reading the literature. It’s not difficult. Before you write a paper, read what other people have done. A simple search on Google scholar will...
Dr. Nina Zumel recently published an excellent tutorial on a modeling technique she called impact coding. It is a pragmatic machine learning technique that has helped with more than one client project. Impact coding is a bridge from Naive Bayes (where each variable’s impact is added without regard to the known effects of any other [...] Related posts: Modeling Trick: Impact Coding of Categorical Variables with Many Levels The equivalence…
The joint statistical meetings is an annual gathering of several large professional organizations of statisticians, and annually we descend on some city to share ideas. I'm a perennial attendee, and always find the conference valuable in several ways. ...
Stephen Senn Competence Centre for Methodology and Statistics CRP Santé Strassen, Luxembourg I think the placebo gets a bad press with ethicists. Many do not seem to understand that the only purpose of a placebo as a control in a randomised clinical trial is to permit the trial to be run as double-blind. A common [...]
[8/9/2012 update]: Got an automated email from Nature: The following post you wrote on the Nature News website has been hidden by the moderator in accordance with our terms and conditions. To editor Brian Owens: I wonder the so called ‘performance profiling’, as mentioned in the title of this article, could be used to judge [...]
David Radwin writes: I am seeking a statistic measuring an estimate’s reliability or stability as an alternative to the coefficient of variation (CV), also known as the relative standard error. The CV is the standard error of an estimate (proportion, mean, regression coefficient, etc.) divided by the estimate itself, usually expressed as a percentage. For [...]
John Mashey sends me this delightful video (not in English but it has subtitles) from the University of Bergen (link comes from this page from Elsevier but I don’t see any direct connection between the controversial academic publisher and the Bergen group). Part of me believes, deep down, that if someone were to send this [...]
The Tenth Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM 2012) Sydney, Australia 5-7 December 2012 http://ausdm12.togaware.com/ Deadline extended to 31 August 2012 The Australasian Data Mining Conference has established itself as the premier Australasian meeting for both practitioners and researchers in data … Continue reading →
There is a stimulating conversation going on between Cathy O'Neil (mathbabe) and CMU Prof. Cosma Shalizi about whether "data science" is different from "statistics". Cathy started by posting some comments about "how to hire data scientists" (link). Cosma responded with white is the new black (link): a "modern" statistics undergraduate training would prepare one well for such jobs. Cathy disagreed on several fronts, favoring PhD training (to be able to…
I have argued previously that research papers should be posted online at the same time as they are submitted to a journal. Sometimes people claim that journals don’t allow it, which is nonsense. Almost every journal allows it, and many also allow the...
In a lovely little 3D movie [nytimes.com] created by the New York Times, we see how every Olympic medalist in the Men's 100-meter freestyle event would stack up to each other. France's Alain Bernard would win (2008), with a wide distribution of Olympi...
I'm late to this, but it is certainly worth posting. A team of researchers at CMU have been working on mining foursquare checkin data to determine behaviourally defined neighborhoods ('livehoods'). They have put together a site - livehoods.org - which...
Genetic algorithm is a search heuristic. GAs can generate a vast number of possible model solutions and use these to evolve towards an approximation of the best solution of the model. Hereby it mimics evolution in nature. GA generates a population, the individuals in this population (often called chromosomes) have Read more »The post Genetic algorithms: a simple R example appeared first on FishyOperations.
A distribution of data which is not normal does not mean it is abnormal. There are many data analysis techniques which do not require the assumption of normality. This webinar will provide information on when it is best to use nonparametric alternatives and provides information on suggested tests to use in lieu of: Independent samples [...]
In my morning attempt to read the whole internet before beginning work, I came across a program on the BBC website which allows you to see which Olympic athletes are your body doubles. Or rather, which athletes share your height and weight, and therefore your body mass index. Being a Canadian, I exist in an
Howard Friedman sent me a new book, The Measure of a Nation, subtitled How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing. Without commenting on the substance of Friedman’s recommendations, I’d like to endorse his strategy of presentation, which is to display graph after graph after graph showing the same message over and [...]
Recently published in Nucleic Acids Research: F. Zambelli, G. M. Prazzoli, G. Pesole, G. Pavesi, Cscan: finding common regulators of a set of genes by using a collection of genome-wide ChIP-seq datasets., Nucleic acids research 40, W510–5 (2012). ...
by Yanchang Zhao, RDataMining.com Below are simple examples of profiling R code, which help to find out which steps or functions are most time consuming. It is very useful for improving efficiency of R code. # profiling of running time … Continue reading →
