## Accumulated Bookchat

July 7, 2014
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Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and I am about to recommend a lot of books. Somehow, I've not posted anything about what I've been reading since September. So: have October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, a...

## Stone Flakes V, networks again

July 6, 2014
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Last week I tried pcalg. This week deal (Learning Bayesian Networks with Mixed Variables). The aim n this post I want to try something new, a causal graphical model. The aim here is just as much to get myself a feel what these things do as to underst...

## Estimating Required Coinage

July 5, 2014
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I would like to code up a simple method of minimizing the number of coins required to give change.  Then I would like see what coins are most likely to be called into usage if change is required from a uniform draw between 1 cent and 499 cents.# I...

## Visualizing sampling error and dynamic graphics

July 5, 2014
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Robert Grant writes: What do you think of this visualisation from the NYT [in an article by Neil Irwin and Kevin Quealy but I'm not sure if they're the designers of the visualization]? I’m pretty impressed as a method of showing sampling error to a general audience! I agree. P.S. In related news, Antony Unwin […] The post Visualizing sampling error and dynamic graphics appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…

## Grand Opening: The Stan Shop

July 5, 2014
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I finally put together a shop so everyone can order Stan t-shirts and mugs: The Stan Shop The art’s by Michael Malecki. The t-shirts and mugs are printed on demand by Spreadshirt. I tried out a sample and the results are great and have held up to machine washing and drying. There’s a markup of […] The post Grand Opening: The Stan Shop appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…

July 5, 2014
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Here we go again - no excuses - time to catch up on your reading:Baillie, R. T., G. Kapetanios, and F. Papailias, 2014. Modified information criteria and selection of long memory time series models. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 76, 116-1...

## 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…