## Tapestry, The Conference About Storytelling With Data

December 18, 2012
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Tapestry is a new conference on storytelling with data. While it focuses on visual ways of telling stories in journalism, there will be a broad range of topics, and a line-up of amazing speakers. Keynotes The highlight of the conference will be the three keynotes. Jonathan Corum is Science Graphics Editor at The New York Times, and also runs his own design studio. His work combines data with a strong…

## Stan and RStan 1.1.0

December 17, 2012
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We’re happy to announce the availability of Stan and RStan versions 1.1.0, which are general tools for performing model-based Bayesian inference using the no-U-turn sampler, an adaptive form of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Information on downloading and installing and using them is available as always from Stan Home Page: http://mc-stan.org/ Let us know if you have [...]

## Differential Isoform Expression With RNA-Seq: Are We Really There Yet?

December 17, 2012
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In case you missed it, a new paper was published in Nature Biotechnology on a method for detecting isoform-level differential expression with RNA-seq Data: Trapnell, Cole, et al. "Differential analysis of gene regulation at transcript resolution with ...

## Differential Isoform Expression With RNA-Seq: Are We Really There Yet?

December 17, 2012
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In case you missed it, a new paper was published in Nature Biotechnology on a method for detecting isoform-level differential expression with RNA-seq Data: Trapnell, Cole, et al. "Differential analysis of gene regulation at transcript resolution with ...

## Differential Isoform Expression With RNA-Seq: Are We Really There Yet?

December 17, 2012
By

In case you missed it, a new paper was published in Nature Biotechnology on a method for detecting isoform-level differential expression with RNA-seq Data: Trapnell, Cole, et al. "Differential analysis of gene regulation at transcript resolution with ...

## PhilStat/Law/Stock: multiplicity and duplicity

December 17, 2012
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So what’s the allegation that the prosecutors are being duplicitous about statistical evidence in the case discussed in my two previous (‘Bad Statistics’) posts? As a non-lawyer, I will ponder only the evidential (and not the criminal) issues involved. “After the conviction, Dr. Harkonen’s counsel moved for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered [...]

## PhilStat/Law/Stock: multiplicity and duplicity

December 17, 2012
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So what’s the allegation that the prosecutors are being duplicitous about statistical evidence in the case discussed in my two previous (‘Bad Statistics’) posts? As a non-lawyer, I will ponder only the evidential (and not the criminal) issues involved. “After the conviction, Dr. Harkonen’s counsel moved for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered [...]

## Should the Cox Proportional Hazards model get the Nobel Prize in Medicine?

December 17, 2012
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I’m not the first one to suggest that Biostatistics has been undervalued in the scientific community, and some of the shortcomings of epidemiology and biostatistics have been noted elsewhere. But this previous work focuses primarily on the contributions of statistics/biostatistics … Continue reading →

## Statistics in a world where nothing is random

December 17, 2012
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Rama Ganesan writes: I think I am having an existential crisis. I used to work with animals (rats, mice, gerbils etc.) Then I started to work in marketing research where we did have some kind of random sampling procedure. So up until a few years ago, I was sort of okay. Now I am teaching [...]

## Bracket as target

December 17, 2012
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The MLB found an innovative way to present the play-off matchup and results: I took this photo at the MLB Fan Cave in Manhattan. This was a marketing gimmick in which a bunch of guys were placed into this "fishbowl"...

## A look at historical Value at Risk

December 17, 2012
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Historical Value at Risk (VaR) is very popular because it is easy and intuitive: use the empirical distribution of some specific number of past returns for the portfolio. Previously “The estimation of Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall” included an R function to estimate historical VaR. Generating portfolios A useful tool to explore risk models … Continue reading →

## True Significance of a T Statistic

December 17, 2012
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The example is more of a statistical exercise that  shows the true significance and the density curve of simulated random normal data.  The code can be changed to generate data using either a different mean and standard deviation or a different distribution altogether. This extends the idea of estimating pi by generating random normal data to determine [...]

## True Significance of a T Statistic

December 17, 2012
By

The example is more of a statistical exercise that  shows the true significance and the density curve of simulated random normal data.  The code can be changed to generate data using either a different mean and standard deviation or a different distribution altogether. This extends the idea of estimating pi by generating random normal data to determine [...]

## Now I see it! K-means cluster analysis in R

December 17, 2012
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Of course, a picture on a computer monitor is a coloured plot of x and y coordinates or pixels. Still, I was smitten by David Sparks' posts on is.r(), where he shows how easy it is to read images into R to analyse them. In two posts [1], [2] he rep...

## Dark matter top 10, but an hour too late

December 17, 2012
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Well, that’s embarrassing. A little tweak to my dark matter model resulted in a leaderboard score in the top 10. The only problem is that the contest closed about an hour ago. I ran this final prediction earlier today but then simply forgot to go back to it and submit!! On the bright side, I […]

## Organising the toolbox in statistics and operations research

December 16, 2012
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Don’t bury students in tools      In our statistics courses and textbooks there is a tendency to hand our students tool after tool, wanting to teach them all they need to know. However students can feel buried under these … Continue reading →

## New Names For Statistical Methods

December 16, 2012
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$New Names For Statistical Methods$

Statisticians and Computer Scientists have done a pretty poor job of thinking of names for procedures. Names are important. No one is going to use a method called “the Stalin-Mussolini Matrix Completion Algorithm.” But who would pass up the opportunity to use the “Schwarzenegger-Shatner Statistic.” So, I have decided to offer some suggestions for re-naming [...]

## The Eye of the World as word cloud

December 16, 2012
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The Eye of the World is the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. As the last of these books will be published soon, I was wondering if natural language processing can be used to examine books like these. For this purpose I downloaded a co...

## Sunday data/statistics link roundup (12/16/12)

December 16, 2012
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A directory of open access journals. Very cool idea to aggregate them. Here is a blog post from one of my favorite statistics bloggers about why open-access journals are so cool. Just like in a lot of other areas, open access … Continue reading →

## The lamest, grudgingest, non-retraction retraction ever

December 16, 2012
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In politics we’re familiar with the non-apology apology (well described in Wikipedia as “a statement that has the form of an apology but does not express the expected contrition”). Here’s the scientific equivalent: the non-retraction retraction. Sanjay Srivastava points to an amusing yet barfable story of a pair of researchers who (inadvertently, I assume) made [...]

## Big Open Public Official Data – What’s next?

December 16, 2012
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Big Data joined Open Data in last year’s discussions.What’s behind this new buzz word? What’s the impact on traditional official …Continue reading »

## Matrix Algebra Useful for Statistics

December 16, 2012
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I was having a conversation with an acquaintance about courses that were particularly useful in our work. My forestry degree involved completing 50 compulsory + 10 elective† courses; if I had to choose courses that were influential and/or really useful they would be Operations Research, Economic Evaluation of Projects, Ecology, 3 Calculus and 2 Algebras. [...]

## NIPS2012 Post Collection

December 15, 2012
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In my office I have two NIPS posters on the wall, 2011 and 2012. But I have not been there and I am not computer scientist neither. But anyway I like NIPS without reason. Now it’s time for me to organize posts from others: NIPS ruminations I NIPS II: Deep Learning and the evolution of […]