## Top 9 questions to ask a statistician

November 23, 2015
By

Someone writes in: I am a student at . . . We have been given an assignment that requires us to interview a professional in the criminal justice field who performs, or has performed, statistical analyses on social science related data. . . . We are supposed to collect information pertaining to job description, job […] The post Top 9 questions to ask a statistician appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…

Read more »

## If a study is worth a mention, it’s worth a link

November 22, 2015
By

Gur Huberman points to this op-ed entitled “Are Good Doctors Bad for Your Health?” and writes: Can’t the NYT provide a link or an explicit reference to the JAMA Internal Medicine article underlying this OpEd? A reader could then access the original piece and judge its credibility for himself I replied: Yes, very tacky of […] The post If a study is worth a mention, it’s worth a link appeared…

Read more »

## Flatten your abs with this new statistical approach to quadrature

November 22, 2015
By

Philipp Hennig, Michael Osborne, and Mark Girolami write: We deliver a call to arms for probabilistic numerical methods: algorithms for numerical tasks, including linear algebra, integration, optimization and solving differential equations, that return uncertainties in their calculations. . . . We describe how several seminal classic numerical methods can be interpreted naturally as probabilistic inference. […] The post Flatten your abs with this new statistical approach to quadrature appeared first…

Read more »

## Sunday morning puzzle

November 21, 2015
By

A question from X validated that took me quite a while to fathom and then the solution suddenly became quite obvious: If a sample taken from an arbitrary distribution on {0,1}⁶ is censored from its (0,0,0,0,0,0) elements, and if the marginal probabilities are know for all six components of the random vector, what is an […]

Read more »

## Free gradient boosting lecture

November 21, 2015
By

We have always regretted that we didn’t get to cover gradient boosting in Practical Data Science with R (Manning 2014). To try make up for that we are sharing (for free) our GBM lecture from our (paid) video course Introduction to Data Science. (link, all support material here). Please help us get the word out … Continue reading Free gradient boosting lecture

Read more »

## Benford lays down the Law

November 21, 2015
By

A few months ago I received in the mail a book called An Introduction to Benford’s Law by Arno Berger and Theodore Hill. I eagerly opened it but I lost interest once I realized it was essentially a pure math book. Not that there’s anything wrong with math, it just wasn’t what I wanted to […] The post Benford lays down the Law appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…

Read more »

## Mathematics Departments and the Talented Mr. Teacher

November 21, 2015
By

Today we have a guest post from a colleague named Mathprof. The pseudonym perhaps is needed as Mathprof's colleagues might not be pleased to read all mathprof's comments. I did some very minor editing, but otherwise the content is Mathprof's. I asked ...

Read more »

## 4 California faculty positions in Design-Based Statistical Inference in the Social Sciences

November 21, 2015
By

This is really cool. The announcement comes from Joe Cummins: The University of California at Riverside is hiring 4 open rank positions in Design-Based Statistical Inference in the Social Sciences. I [Cummins] think this is a really exciting opportunity for researchers doing all kinds of applied social science statistical work, especially work that cuts across […] The post 4 California faculty positions in Design-Based Statistical Inference in the Social Sciences…

Read more »

## Erich Lehmann: Neyman-Pearson & Fisher on P-values

November 20, 2015
By

Today is Erich Lehmann’s birthday (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009). Lehmann was Neyman’s first student at Berkeley (Ph.D 1942), and his framing of Neyman-Pearson (NP) methods has had an enormous influence on the way we typically view them. I got to know Erich in 1997, shortly after publication of EGEK (1996). One day, I received […]

Read more »

## Stan Puzzle 2: Distance Matrix Parameters

November 20, 2015
By
$Stan Puzzle 2: Distance Matrix Parameters$

This puzzle comes in three parts. There are some hints at the end. Part I: Constrained Parameter Definition Define a Stan program with a transformed matrix parameter d that is constrained to be a K by K distance matrix. Recall that a distance matrix must satisfy the definition of a metric for all i, j: […] The post Stan Puzzle 2: Distance Matrix Parameters appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…

Read more »

## Countries of refugees to the US in 2014 and their destinations

November 20, 2015
By

A tweet from Kyle Walker introduced me to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Using multiple R packages such as shiny, rCharts, rcdimple, leaflet, and d3heatmap, this post looks at the count...

Read more »

## Tip o’ the iceberg to ya

November 20, 2015
By

Paul Alper writes: The Washington Post ran this article by Fred Barbas with an interesting quotation: “Every day, on average, a scientific paper is retracted because of misconduct,” Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, who run Retraction Watch, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in May. But, can that possibly be true, just for misconduct […] The post Tip o’ the iceberg to ya appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…

Read more »

## Internet use and religion, part three

November 19, 2015
By

This article reports preliminary results from an exploration of the relationship between religion and Internet use in Europe, using data from the European Social Survey (ESS).I describe the data processing pipeline and models in this previous article. ...

Read more »

## Some Links Related to Randomized Controlled Trials for Policymaking

November 19, 2015
By

In response to my previous post, Avi Feller sent me these links related to efforts promoting the use of RCTs  and evidence-based approaches for policymaking:  The theme of this year's just-concluded APPAM conference (the national public policy research organization) was "evidence-based policymaking," with a headline panel on using experiments in policy (see here and here). Jeff Liebman

Read more »

## Fluid use of data

November 19, 2015
By

Nina Zumel and I recently wrote a few article and series on best practices in testing models and data: Random Test/Train Split is not Always Enough How Do You Know if Your Data Has Signal? How do you know if your model is going to work? A Simpler Explanation of Differential Privacy (explaining the reusable … Continue reading Fluid use of data

Read more »

## Habits and open data: Helping students develop a theory of scientific mind

November 19, 2015
By

This post is related to my open science talk with Candice Morey at Psychonomics 2015 in Chicago; also read Candice's new post on the pragmatics: "A visit from the Ghost of Research Past". In this post, we suggest three ideas that can be implemented in ...

Read more »

## I like the Monkey Cage

November 19, 2015
By

The sister blog is a good place to reach a wider audience, also our co-bloggers and guests have interesting posts on important topics, but what I really like about our blog at the Washington Post is its seriousness and its political science perspective. For better or worse, political science does not have a high profile […] The post I like the Monkey Cage appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…

Read more »

## Egregious chart brings back bad memories

November 19, 2015
By

My friend Alberto Cairo said it best: if you see bullshit, say "bullshit!" He was very incensed by this egregious "infographic": (link to his post) Emily Schuch provided a re-visualization: The new version provides a much richer story of how...

Read more »

## The Unreported War On America’s Poor

November 18, 2015
By

The Democratic firebrand Bernie Sander's keeps harping on this point about income inequality in the United States, yet I have to wonder, how bad is it really and do we care?First off, there is a legitimate reason to ask, if we should care. After all, t...

Read more »

## First, second, and third order bias corrections (also, my ugly R code for the mortality-rate graphs!)

November 18, 2015
By

As an applied statistician, I don’t do a lot of heavy math. I did prove a true theorem once (with the help of some collaborators), but that was nearly twenty years ago. Most of the time I walk along pretty familiar paths, just hoping that other people will do the mathematical work necessary for me […] The post First, second, and third order bias corrections (also, my ugly R code…

Read more »

## Pareto smoothed importance sampling and infinite variance (2nd ed)

November 18, 2015
By

This post is by Aki Last week Xi’an blogged about an arXiv paper by Chatterjee and Diaconis which considers the proper sample size in an importance sampling setting with infinite variance. I commented Xi’an’s posting and the end result was my guest blog posting in Xi’an’s og. I made an additional figure below to summarise […] The post Pareto smoothed importance sampling and infinite variance (2nd ed) appeared first on…

Read more »

## Create a map with PROC SGPLOT

November 18, 2015
By

Did you know that you can use the POLYGON statement in PROC SGPLOT to draw a map? The graph at the left shows the 48 contiguous states of the US, overlaid with markers that indicate the locations of major cities. The plot was created by using the POLYGON statement, which […] The post Create a map with PROC SGPLOT appeared first on The DO Loop.

Read more »

## Link: The NIPS Experiment

November 18, 2015
By

The conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) has conducted a fascinating experiment: split the program committee into two and get 10% of submissions reviewed by both. The article I’m linking to above has a great analysis of what they found (and it’s not encouraging). This would be a great experiment to run at VIS. Anybody who has spent any … Continue reading Link: The NIPS Experiment

Read more »

 Tweet

Email: