A. Spanos lecture on “Frequentist Hypothesis Testing”

December 19, 2013
By

I attended a lecture by Aris Spanos to his graduate econometrics class here at Va Tech last week[i]. This course, which Spanos teaches every fall, gives a superb illumination of the disparate pieces involved in statistical inference and modeling, and affords clear foundations for how they are linked together. His slides follow the intro section. Some […]

Revised evidence for statistical standards

December 19, 2013
By

X and I heard about this much-publicized recent paper by Val Johnson, who suggests changing the default level of statistical significance from z=2 to z=3 (or, as he puts it, going from p=.05 to p=.005 or .001). Val argues that you need to go out to 3 standard errors to get a Bayes factor of […]The post Revised evidence for statistical standards appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…

Some fields produce more false results than others

December 19, 2013
By

John Ioannidis stirred up a healthy debate when he published Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. Unfortunately, most of the discussion has been over whether the word “most” is correct, i.e. whether the proportion of false results is more or less than 50 percent. At least there is more awareness that some published results […]

December 19, 2013
By

Joran E. sends us to the following chart via Twitter. Link to the original here. *** The top chart fails our self-sufficiency test. There are only eight numbers in the data. All eight numbers are printed onto the chart. If...

Sharp Statistics helps Aquafuel

December 19, 2013
By

Aquafuel Research Limited have developed technology that makes it possible to run standard diesel powered combined heat and power (CHP) plants on renewable bio fuels. To be able to analyse the performance of installed CHP units and to assess the requi...

In Memoriam Dennis Lindley

December 18, 2013
By

So. Farewell then Dennis Lindley. You held the Hard line on Bayesianism When others Had doubts. And you share The name of a famous Paradox. What is your subjective Prior now? We can only Infer. R. A. Thribb (17 1/2) P.S. The post In Memoriam Dennis Li...

Numbersense News

December 18, 2013
By

Here are a few links to recent coverage of Numbersense: Arati Mejdal has an interesting list of 20 books, which should interest my readers: link Albert Cairo selects it as one of his favorites of 2013: link. Pay attention to his recommendations for visual design books. Rakesh Arya writes a review of the book, concluding: "The examples are quite apt with the topics and easily understood as they are explained…

Curoverse raises \$1.5M to develop & support an open-source bioinformatics data analysis platform

December 18, 2013
By

Boston-based startup Curoverse has announced \$1.5 million in funding to develop and support the open-source Arvados platform for cloud-based bioinformatics & genomics data analysis.The Arvados platform was developed in George Church's lab by s...

A Christmas tree matrix

December 18, 2013
By

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Last year a fractal made thee! O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, A heat map can display thee! O tree of green, adorned with lights! A trunk of brown, the rest is white. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, A heat map can display [...]

Open access

December 17, 2013
By

I was really impressed by the very smooth process through which my paper on cost-effectiveness analysis in the presence of structural zero costs (which I've already mentioned for example here and here; the related R package is described here) has ...

Conditional dependence measures

December 17, 2013
By
$(Y_1,Y_2)$

This week, I spend some time at the Workshop on Nonparametric Curve Smoothing conference at Concordia. Yesterday afternoon, Noël Veraverbeke show an interesting graph, to illustrate conditional copulas (and the derivation of conditional dependence measures, such as Kendall’s tau, or Spearman’s rho). A long time ago, in my PhD thesis (mainly on conditional copulas) I did try to derive conditional dependence measures (in a dedicated chapter). In my PhD, I was…

Replication backlash

December 17, 2013
By

Raghuveer Parthasarathy pointed me to an article in Nature by Mina Bissell, who writes, “The push to replicate findings could shelve promising research and unfairly damage the reputations of careful, meticulous scientists.” I can see where she’s coming from: if you work hard day after day in the lab, it’s gotta be a bit frustrating […]The post Replication backlash appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

Review: Kölner R Meeting 13 December 2013

December 17, 2013
By

Last week's Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended so far. Well, we had a great line up indeed. Matt Dowle came over from London to give an introduction to the data.table package. He was joined by his collaborator Arun Srinivasan, who is ba...

Excel, fanaticism and R

December 17, 2013
By

This week I’ve been feeling tired of excessive fanaticism (or zealotry) of open source software (OSS) and R in general. I do use a fair amount of OSS and pushed for the adoption of R in our courses; in fact, I do think OSS is a Good ThingTM. I do not like, however, constant yabbering […]

On Wigner’s law (and the semi-circle)

December 17, 2013
By
$n\times n$

There is something that I love about mathematics: sometimes, you discover – by chance – a law. It has always been there, it might have been well known by some people (specialized in some given field), but you did not know it. And then, you discover it, and you start wondering how comes you never heard about it before… I experienced that feeling this evening, while working on the syallbus for…

THE END

December 17, 2013
By

In addition to being the best comedy TV show ever, Seinfeld was a great source of wisdom. In one episode, Jerry counsels George: “When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off.” Later, George has a good line at a meeting at Kruger Industrial Smoothing. Then he says: “Alright! That’s it for […]

THE END

December 17, 2013
By

In addition to being the best comedy TV show ever, Seinfeld was a great source of wisdom. In one episode, Jerry counsels George: “When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off.” Later, George has a good line at a meeting at Kruger Industrial Smoothing. Then he says: “Alright! That’s it for […]

Christmas came early (or who’s the geekiest in the family?)

December 16, 2013
By

By pure accident (honest! I didn't do it on purpose!), last week I opened a package that had come in the post for Marta. Too bad that, of all the packages I could have opened, this was the Christmas gift she had bought (in fact I should say manufacture...

A summary of the evidence that most published research is false

December 16, 2013
By

One of the hottest topics in science has two main conclusions: Most published research is false There is a reproducibility crisis in science The first claim is often stated in a slightly different way: that most results of scientific experiments … Continue reading →

Whither the “bet on sparsity principle” in a nonsparse world?

December 16, 2013
By

Rob Tibshirani writes: Hastie et al. (2001) coined the informal “Bet on Sparsity” principle. The l1 methods assume that the truth is sparse, in some basis. If the assumption holds true, then the parameters can be efficiently estimated using l1 penalties. If the assumption does not hold—so that the truth is dense—then no method will […]The post Whither the “bet on sparsity principle” in a nonsparse world? appeared first on…

The exception to the rule against dual axes

December 16, 2013
By

Dual axes are almost always a bad idea. But there is one situation under which I'd use it. *** Last week, Alberto Cairo (link) engaged in a Twitter/blogging debate about a chart that first appeared in Reuters concerning the state...

The exception to the rule against dual axes

December 16, 2013
By

Dual axes are almost always a bad idea. But there is one situation under which I'd use it. *** Last week, Alberto Cairo (link) engaged in a Twitter/blogging debate about a chart that first appeared in Reuters concerning the state...

FRB St. Louis is Far Ahead of the Data Pack

December 16, 2013
By

The email below arrived recently from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It reminds me of something that's hardly a secret, but that nevertheless merits applause, namely that FRBSL's Research Department is a wonderful source of economic and fi...