## Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2014

August 28, 2014
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Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Robert Hughes, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History As the subtitle suggests, a bit of a grab-bag of Hughes talking about Rome, or Rome-related, subjects, seemingly as they caught his attent...

## One of the worst infographics ever, but people don’t care?

August 28, 2014
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This post is by Phil Price. Perhaps prompted by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, this infographic has been making the rounds: I think this is one of the worst I have ever seen. I don’t know where it came from, so I can’t give credit/blame where it’s due. Let’s put aside the numbers themselves – […] The post One of the worst infographics ever, but people don’t care? appeared first…

## Mathematical and Applied Statistics Lesson of the Day – The Motivation and Intuition Behind Markov’s Inequality

$Mathematical and Applied Statistics Lesson of the Day – The Motivation and Intuition Behind Markov’s Inequality$

Markov’s inequality may seem like a rather arbitrary pair of mathematical expressions that are coincidentally related to each other by an inequality sign: where . However, there is a practical motivation behind Markov’s inequality, and it can be posed in the form of a simple question: How often is the random variable “far” away from […]

August 27, 2014
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Next week I'm off to the RSS conference in Sheffield, where I'll present our work on the Eurovision contest. I'm quite excited about going back to Sheffield, where some time in the last century, I've spent a semester as an Erasmus Exchange student. In ...

## Discussion of “A probabilistic model for the spatial distribution of party support in multiparty elections”

August 27, 2014
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From 1994. I don’t have much to say about this one. The paper I was discussing (by Samuel Merrill) had already been accepted by the journal—I might even have been a referee, in which case the associate editor had decided to accept the paper over my objections—and the editor gave me the opportunity to publish […] The post Discussion of “A probabilistic model for the spatial distribution of party support…

## People are happier in some parts of the country as Labor Day nears

August 27, 2014
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An anonymous reader sent in a Type V critique of the following map of July unemployment rates by state. The map was published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and used in a recent article in Vox. Matt @...

## R Workshops Updated to Include the Latest Packages

August 27, 2014
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Two new R packages are quickly becoming standards in the R community: Hadley Wickham’s dplyr and tidyr. The dplyr package almost completely replaces his popular plyr package for data manipulation. Most importantly for general R use, it makes it much easier … Continue reading →

## Metrico: a Puzzle Action Game based on Infographics

August 27, 2014
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Metrico [metrico-game.com], designed by Dutch game design studio Digital Dreams, is a recently released video game for the Playstation Vita. Described as an "atmospheric puzzle action game with a mindset of its own", it's visual style has been com...

## Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2014

August 27, 2014
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Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming, et al. Powers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14) Comic book mind candy, at the super-hero/police-procedural interface. Martha Wells, The...

## Counting observations in two-dimensional bins

August 27, 2014
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Last Monday I discussed how to choose the bin width and location for a histogram in SAS. The height of each histogram bar shows the number of observations in each bin. Although my recent article didn't mention it, you can also use the IML procedure to count the number of […]

## N.Z. Econometrics Study Group, 2015

August 27, 2014
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Thanks to Peter Phillips, the New Zealand Econometric Study Group has been going strong for a quarter of  a century. I last mentioned the group after my participation in the meeting last year - see here. In February of 2015 the NZESG mee...

## An Achievement on Stack Overflow

August 26, 2014
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Last Friday (August 22nd), I achieved a milestone on Stack Overflow, a computing question-and-answer site, by hitting 200,000 points.  So far this year, I have also earned more points than anyone, a testament to my obsession with the site (you can...

August 26, 2014
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What is the Gauss-Markov theorem? From “The Cambridge Dictionary of Statistics” B. S. Everitt, 2nd Edition: A theorem that proves that if the error terms in a multiple regression have the same variance and are uncorrelated, then the estimators of the parameters in the model produced by least squares estimation are better (in the sense … Continue reading Reading the Gauss-Markov theorem → Related posts: What is meant by regression…

## Dave Blei course on Foundations of Graphical Models

August 26, 2014
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Dave Blei writes: This course is cross listed in Computer Science and Statistics at Columbia University. It is a PhD level course about applied probabilistic modeling. Loosely, it will be similar to this course. Students should have some background in probability, college-level mathematics (calculus, linear algebra), and be comfortable with computer programming. The course is […] The post Dave Blei course on Foundations of Graphical Models appeared first on Statistical…

## Review of “Forecasting Elections”

August 26, 2014
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From 1993. The topic of election forecasting sure gets a lot more attention than it used to! Here are some quotes from my review of that book by Michael Lewis-Beck and Tom Rice: Political scientists are aware that most voters are consistent in their preferences, and one can make a good guess just looking at […] The post Review of “Forecasting Elections” appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…

## Introduction to the Course; Basic Data Types (Introduction to Statistical Computing)

August 26, 2014
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Introduction to the course: statistical programming for autonomy, honesty, and clarity of thought. The functional programming idea: write code by building functions to transform input data into desired outputs. Basic data types: Booleans, integers, ...

August 26, 2014
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Over the weekend we released version 0.1.8 of the ChainLadder package for claims reserving on CRAN. What is claims reserving?The insurance industry, unlike other industries, does not sell products as such but promises. An insurance policy is a promise ...

## The Chi-Squared Test of Independence – An Example in Both R and SAS

$The Chi-Squared Test of Independence – An Example in Both R and SAS$

Introduction The chi-squared test of independence is one of the most basic and common hypothesis tests in the statistical analysis of categorical data.  Given 2 categorical random variables, and , the chi-squared test of independence determines whether or not there exists a statistical dependence between them.  Formally, it is a hypothesis test with the following null and […]

## Continuous or Discrete Latent Structure? Correspondence Analysis vs. Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

August 25, 2014
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A map gives us the big picture, which is why mapping has become so important in marketing research. What is the perceptual structure underlying the European automotive market? All we need is a contingency table with cars as the rows, attributes as the ...

## On Rockets and Feathers

August 25, 2014
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"Rockets and Feathers" is a term that is often used to describe the (apparent) asymmetric responses of downstream price changes to changes in upstream prices. I believe that the expression was coined by Bacon (1991), and it's been used frequently in th...

## Discussion of “Maximum entropy and the nearly black object”

August 25, 2014
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From 1992. It’s a discussion of a paper by Donoho, Johnstone, Hoch, and Stern. As I summarize: Under the “nearly black” model, the normal prior is terrible, the entropy prior is better and the exponential prior is slightly better still. (An even better prior distribution for the nearly black model would combine the threshold and […] The post Discussion of “Maximum entropy and the nearly black object” appeared first on…

## The Many Factors Influencing Breast Cancer Incidence

August 25, 2014
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A Model of Breast Cancer Causation [cabreastcancer.org], designed by 'do good with data' visualization studio Periscopic illustrates many of the factors that can lead to breast cancer and how they may interact with others. The interactive circos gra...

## How we Sleep (and How we Awake after an Earthquake)

August 25, 2014
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Since we already know in what angle people put their face when taking a selfie in different cities, we now also know how they sleep differently: Which Cities Get the Most Sleep? [wsj.com] by interactive graphics editor Stuart A. Thompson of the Wall S...