## From our “Philosophy of Statistics” session: APS 2015 convention

May 25, 2015
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“The Philosophy of Statistics: Bayesianism, Frequentism and the Nature of Inference,” at the 2015 American Psychological Society (APS) Annual Convention in NYC, May 23, 2015:   D. Mayo: “Error Statistical Control: Forfeit at your Peril”    S. Senn: “‘Repligate’: reproducibility in statistical studies. What does it mean and in what sense does it matter?”   […]

## another viral math puzzle

May 24, 2015
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After the Singapore Maths Olympiad birthday problem that went viral, here is a Vietnamese primary school puzzle that made the frontline in The Guardian. The question is: Fill the empty slots with all integers from 1 to 9 for the equality to hold. In other words, find a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i such that a+13xb:c+d+12xe–f-11+gxh:i-10=66. With presumably the operation […]

May 24, 2015
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Executive summary Surprisingly good. And it’s not like my expectations were especially low. Structure There are 20 chapters.  I mostly like the chapters and their order. Hadley breaks the 20 chapters into 4 parts.  He’s wrong.  Figure 1 illustrates the correct way to formulate parts. Figure 1: Chapters and Parts of Advanced R.    Introductory R There […] The post Review of ‘Advanced R’ by Hadley Wickham appeared first on Burns Statistics.

## John Nash, 1928 – 2015

May 24, 2015
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John & Alicia NashTragically, John and Alicia Nash died as the result of a road accident on New Jersey yesterday.Just days previously, Nash was the co-recipient of the 2015 Abel Prize for his contributions to the theory of nonlinear parti...

## Chess + statistics + plagiarism, again!

May 24, 2015
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In response to this post (in which I noted that the Elo chess rating system is a static model which, paradoxically, is used to for the purposes of studying changes), Keith Knight writes: It’s notable that Glickman’s work is related to some research by Harry Joe at UBC, which in turn was inspired by data […] The post Chess + statistics + plagiarism, again! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…

## Any P-Value Distinguishable from Zero is Insufficiently Informative

May 23, 2015
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## My favorite R bug

May 23, 2015
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In this note am going to recount “my favorite R bug.” It isn’t a bug in R. It is a bug in some code I wrote in R. I call it my favorite bug, as it is easy to commit and (thanks to R’s overly helpful nature) takes longer than it should to find. ...

## Kaiser’s beef

May 23, 2015
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The Numbersense guy writes in: Have you seen this? It has one of your pet peeves… let’s draw some data-driven line in the categorical variable and show significance. To make it worse, he adds a final paragraph saying essentially this is just a silly exercise that I hastily put together and don’t take it seriously! […] The post Kaiser’s beef appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

## No Hesitations is Not a Phishing Site!

May 23, 2015
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Google's "automatic system" a few days ago "determined" that No Hesitations (fxdiebold.blogspot.com) was a phishing site. (Phishing sites attempt to scam users into revealing credit card numbers, etc. No Hesitations is not a phishing site! Indeed ...

## Parametric Inference: Likelihood Ratio Test Problem 2

May 23, 2015
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More on Likelihood Ratio Test, the following problem is originally from Casella and Berger (2001), exercise 8.12.ProblemFor samples of size $n=1,4,16,64,100$ from a normal population with mean $\mu$ and known variance $\sigma^2$, plot the power functio...

## Maximum Likelihood Estimation & Inequality Constraints

May 23, 2015
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This post is prompted by a question raised by Irfan, one of this blog's readers, in some email correspondence with me a while back.The question was to do with imposing inequality constraints on the parameter estimates when applying maximum likelihood e...

## Simulation-based power analysis using proportional odds logistic regression

May 22, 2015
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Consider planning a clinicial trial where patients are randomized in permuted blocks of size four to either a 'control' or 'treatment' group. The outcome is measured on an 11-point ordinal scale (e.g., the numerical rating scale for pain). It may be reasonable to evaluate the results of this trial using a proportional odds cumulative logit … Continue reading Simulation-based power analysis using proportional odds logistic regression →

## R Now Contains 150 Times as Many Commands as SAS

May 22, 2015
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by Bob Muenchen In my ongoing quest to analyze the world of analytics, I’ve updated the Growth in Capability section of The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. To save you the trouble of foraging through that tome, I’ve pasted it below. … Continue reading →

## John Lott as possible template for future career of “Bruno” Lacour

May 22, 2015
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The recent story about the retracted paper on political persuasion reminded me of the last time that a politically loaded survey was discredited because the researcher couldn’t come up with the data. I’m referring to John Lott, the “economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate” (in the words of Wikipedia) who is perhaps more well […] The post John Lott as possible template for future career of “Bruno” Lacour appeared…

## Should I tell students that the maximum score in the class is 137?

May 22, 2015
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This op-ed by Richard Thaler caught my attention because I have a similar experience. In my statistics classes, I have noticed a pattern: if the mid-term exam is hard, with a lower average score (say 75-80%), the students look crestfallen and feel that they did not learn; eventually, when it comes to evaluating the instructor, I receive lower grades, with comments indicating that I have not taught them properly to…

## Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist

May 22, 2015
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Brent Goldfarb and Andrew King, in a paper to appear in the journal Strategic Management, write: In a recent issue of this journal, Bettis (2012) reports a conversation with a graduate student who forthrightly announced that he had been trained by faculty to “search for asterisks”. The student explained that he sifted through large databases […] The post Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist appeared first…

May 21, 2015
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## BREAKING . . . Princeton decides to un-hire Kim Jong-Un for tenure-track assistant professorship in aeronautical engineering

May 21, 2015
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Full story here. Here’s the official quote: As you’ve correctly noted, at this time the individual is not a Princeton University employee. We will review all available information and determine next steps. And here’s what Kim has to say: I’m gathering evidence and relevant information so I can provide a single comprehensive response. I will […] The post BREAKING . . . Princeton decides to un-hire Kim Jong-Un for tenure-track…

## Bond Yields, Macro Fundamentals, and Policy

May 20, 2015
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Greetings my friends from Eurovision in Vienna. Yes, OK, that's not exactly the real reason I'm here, but still...As I said in an earlier post that stressed DNS/AFNS yield-curve modeling with the zero lower bound imposed, "although ...

## A Pleasant Surprise

May 20, 2015
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I could scarcely believe my good fortune when I opened the following email earlier today:Dear Dr Giles,Congratulations, your paper “Being ‘in’ assessment: The ontological layer(ing) of assessment practice” published in Journal of Applied R...