## FLAT PRIORS IN FLATLAND: STONE’S PARADOX

December 8, 2012
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$FLAT PRIORS IN FLATLAND: STONE’S PARADOX$

FLAT PRIORS IN FLATLAND: STONE’S PARADOX Mervyn Stone is Emeritus Professor at University College London. He is famous for his work on Bayesian inference as well as pioneering work on cross-validation, coordinate-free multivariate analysis, as well as many other topics. Today I want to discuss a famous example of his, described in Stone (1970, 1976, [...]

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## Bridge hand distribution: simulation vs exact calculation

December 8, 2012
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Recently I played bridge with my friends. Being frustrated with several consecutive poor hand distributions we asked ourselves a question what is the probability of having a hand good enough for a small slam. A well known rule of thumb is that you need...

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## XLLoop framework

December 8, 2012
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Today I want to highlight the XLLoop framework : Excel User-Define Functions in in any language. The XLLoop consists of two main components: An Excel addin implementation (XLL written in c++). A server and framework written in R (or/and in many other languages). The XLLoop allows you to connect Excel and R in very simple [...]

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## Singular Value Decomposition in SciPy

December 7, 2012
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SciPy contains two methods to compute the singular value decomposition (SVD) of a matrix: scipy.linalg.svd and scipy.sparse.linalg.svds. In this post I'll compare both methods for the task of computing the full SVD of a large dense matrix. The first me...

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## Please stop using Excel-like formats to exchange data

December 7, 2012
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I know “officially” data scientists all always work in “big data” environments with data in a remote database, streaming store or key-value system. But in day to day work Excel files and Excel export files get used a lot and cause a disproportionate amount of pain. I would like to make a plea to my [...] Related posts: Large Data Logistic Regression (with example Hadoop code) Added worked example to…

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## Feedback on my Bayesian Data Analysis class at Columbia

December 7, 2012
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In one of the final Jitts, we asked the students how the course could be improved. Some of their suggestions would work, some would not. I’m putting all the suggestions below, interpolating my responses. (Overall, I think the course went well. Please remember that the remarks below are not course evaluations; they are answers to [...]

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## Nov. Palindrome Winner: Kepler

December 7, 2012
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See Thomas Kepler’s statement and palindrome. Filed under: Announcement, Statistics

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## "Your Favorite ERGM Sucks"*, in Philadelphia

December 7, 2012
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Attention conservation notice: Self-promotion of an academic talk, based on a year-old paper, on arcane theoretical aspects of statistical network models. Since everybody in my professional world seems to be going to Lake Tahoe, I am, naturally, goi...

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## StatMilk: Football Statistics Visualized

December 6, 2012
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StatMilk is for a general sports fans like what Weather Spark is for people who like to talk about the weather. As an increasing number of sports fans and reporters tend to rely on statistics to gauge the quality of their division, teams and players...

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## Link to Item Response Theory Presentations Using R

December 6, 2012
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After my post on item response theory,  a number of you have asked for links to applications that provide R code.  As I noted in that post, a good deal of work is being done in an area of research called patient-related outcome measurement (P...

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## Yes, checking calibration of probability forecasts is part of Bayesian statistics

December 6, 2012
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Yes, checking calibration of probability forecasts is part of Bayesian statistics. At the end of this post are three figures from Chapter 1 of Bayesian Data Analysis illustrating empirical evaluation of forecasts. But first the background. Why am I bringing this up now? It’s because of something Larry Wasserman wrote the other day: One of [...]

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## Nate Silver is a Frequentist: Review of “the signal and the noise”

December 6, 2012
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Reblogged from Normal Deviate: Nate Silver Is A Frequentist Review of ``the signal and the noise'' by Nate Silver There are not very many self-made statisticians, let alone self-made statisticians who become famous and get hired by the New York Times. Nate Silver is a fascinating person. And his book the signal and the noise, […]

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## To reject random walk in climate

December 6, 2012
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I read the post The surprisingly weak case for global warming and the rejection; Climate: Misspecified. Based on the first, I wanted to make a post, just to write I agree with the second.The post features a number of plots like thisFor m...

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## Open Data Institute officially launches | RSSeNews

December 6, 2012
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Open Data Institute officially launches | RSSeNews:December 5, 2012 The Open Data Institute (ODI) was opened by cabinet ministers Francis Maude and David Willetts yesterday (4 December 2012), in a week when the Institute also announced two major affili...

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## My fiscal cliff letter to congress

December 6, 2012
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The ASA recently sent out an email asking its members to contact their representatives in congress to urge them to avoid the 8.2% cuts to NIH, NSF, and federal statistical agencies. I had been meaning to do this, but felt that the ASA letter template was too long. Here is the edited version that I [...]

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## Stephen Kosslyn’s principles of graphics and one more: There’s no need to cram everything into a single plot

December 6, 2012
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Jerzy Wieczorek has an interesting review of the book Graph Design for the Eye and Mind by psychology researcher Stephen Kosslyn. I recommend you read all of Wieczorek’s review (and maybe Kosslyn’s book, but that I haven’t seen), but here I’ll just focus on one point. Here’s Wieczorek summarizing Kosslyn: p. 18-19: the horizontal axis [...]

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## Again with variability of long-short decile tests

December 6, 2012
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A simpler approach to producing the variability. Previously The post “Variability in long-short decile strategy tests” proposed a way of assessing the variability of strategy tests in which a long-short portfolio is created by equally weighting the top and bottom deciles. Improved idea Joe Mezrich suggests maintaining equal weights but bootstrapping the assets within the … Continue reading →

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## Confusing headline and capitalization leads to hopes raised, then dashed

December 6, 2012
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I read the following under the headline, Behind a Flop, a Play(wright) Within a Play”: A stroll down West 45th Street in the theater district is all it takes to understand the contradictory fortunes facing David Mamet, for years the heavyweight of bare-knuckled American playwrights, as well as the producers who believe that loyalty to [...]

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## TFX Package

December 6, 2012
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Today I want to highlight the TFX Package created by Garrett See. TFX is an R Interface to the TrueFX(tm) Web API for free streaming real-time and historical tick-by-tick market data for dealable interbank foreign exchange rates with millisecond detail. Garrett provided a great tutorial, examples, and shiny application of TFX at http://rpubs.com/gsee/TFX Please note [...]

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## The Grinch Comes Back

December 5, 2012
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Wayne Folta writes: In keeping with your interest in graphs, this might interest or inspire you, if you haven’t seen it already, which features 20 scientific graphs that Wired likes, ranging from drawn illustrations to trajectory plots. My reaction: I looked at the first 10. I liked 1, 3, and 5, I didn’t like 2, [...]

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## Email is a to-do list made by other people – can someone make it more efficient?!

December 5, 2012
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This is a follow-up to one of our most popular posts: getting email responses from busy people. This post had been in the drafts for a few weeks, then this morning I saw this quote in our Twitter feed: Your … Continue reading →

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## The p-value is not . . .

December 5, 2012
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From a recent email exchange: I agree that you should never compare p-values directly. The p-value is a strange nonlinear transformation of data that is only interpretable under the null hypothesis. Once you abandon the null (as we do when we observe something with a very low p-value), the p-value itself becomes irrelevant. To put [...]

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