The finalists and the winner of the bad graph contest are announced. All of the entries had serious problems so choosing a winner was difficult.
The finalists and the winner of the bad graph contest are announced. All of the entries had serious problems so choosing a winner was difficult.
Spurred by Rafa’s post on evaluating statisticians working in genomics, there’s an interesting discussion going on at the Scientists for Reproducible Research group on statistics journals. Evan Johnson kicks it off: …our statistics j...
Spurred by Rafa’s post on evaluating statisticians working in genomics, there’s an interesting discussion going on at the Scientists for Reproducible Research group on statistics journals. Evan Johnson kicks it off: …our statistics j...
Forestry is the province of variability. From a spatial point of view this variability ranges from within-tree variation (e.g. modeling wood properties) to billions of trees growing in millions of hectares (e.g. forest inventory). From a temporal point of view … Continue reading →
I’ve been very quiet on-line in the last few months, due mainly to the fact that I’ve been writing a new undergraduate course on multivariate data analysis. Although there are many books and on-line notes on the general topic of multivariate statistics, I wanted to do something a little bit different from any text I […]
19. A survey is taken of students in a metropolitan area. At the first stage a school is sampled at random. The schools are divided into two strata: 20 private schools and 50 public schools are sampled. At the second stage, 5 classes are sampled within each sampled school. At the third stage, 10 students [...]
For an hour or so earlier today Serious Stats was #1 in the amazon.co.uk sales rank for the category: Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Methodology > Statistics As of writing the rank has dropped to #3 (but I’m still quite excited – even though I know this may not imply large numbers of pre-orders). They have also […]
This year I recorded my lectures during my Statistics for Genomics course. Slowly but surely I am putting all the videos on Youtube. Links will eventually be here (all slides and the first lecture is already up). As new lectures become available I wi...
A few folks have asked me how I get my news and stay on top of what's going on in my field, so I thought I'd share my strategy. With so many sources of information begging for your attention, the difficulty is not necessarily finding what's interesting...
Thomas Basbøll writes: A blog called The Thesis Whisperer was recently pointed out to me. I [Basbøll] haven’t looked at it closely, but I’ll be reading it regularly for a while before I recommend it. I’m sure it’s a good place to go to discover that you’re not alone, especially when you’re struggling with your [...]
Nick has a paper in the American Statistician warning about bias in multiple imputation arising from rounding data imputed under a normal assumption. One example where you might run afoul of this is if the data are truly dichotomous or count variables...
I just noticed that Markus Gesmann has a nice post on using RStudio, knitr, Pandoc, and Slidy to create slideshows. After my recent attempt to use deck.rb to turn a Markdown/knitr file into a deck.js presentation I caved in and also decided to go with ...
In the SAS/IML language, a user-defined function or subroutine is called a module. Modules are used to extend the capability of the SAS/IML language. Usually you need to explicitly load modules before you use them, but there are two cases where PROC IML loads a module automatically. Modules in IMLMLIB [...]
Tonight I will give a talk at the Cambridge R user group about googleVis. Following my good experience with knitr and RStudio to create interactive reports, I thought that I should try to create the slides in the same way as well. Christopher Gandrud'...
Only a few more sleeps until EuroVis! As we approach the big date, here are some practical tips and tricks about Vienna, the local culture and the exotic customs of the natives. Just to avoid misunderstandings: I am Austrian and I lived in Vienna for 10 years before coming to the U.S. This is important context for any criticism and making fun of Vienna, Austria, the Viennese, etc. in this…
In the last post, Classical Technical Patterns, I discussed the algorithm and pattern definitions presented in the Foundations of Technical Analysis by A. Lo, H. Mamaysky, J. Wang (2000) paper. Today, I want to check how different patterns performed historically using SPY. I will follow the rolling window procedure discussed on pages 14-15 of the [...]
The end is near! At least the semester is coming to an end, so students have crazy expectations like getting marks back for assignments, and administrators want to see exam scripts. Sigh! What has been happening meanwhile in Quantum Forest? … Continue reading →
Economist Catherine Rampell who writes for NYT's Economix blog wondered why economists are rated as the #5 most sleep-deprived profession in the country. (link) She noted: Economists in academia, at least, seem to have flexible schedules that should let them get lots of sleep. Maybe a lot of them are grad students scrambling to publish, publish, publish. Or maybe there are a lot of folks like Larry Summers who prefer…
18. A survey is taken of 100 undergraduates, 100 graduate students, and 100 continuing education students at a university. Assume a simple random sample within each group. Each student is asked to rate his or her satisfaction (on a 1–10 scale) with his or her experiences. Write the estimate and standard error of the average [...]
This is yet another outstanding post by Paul Graham, this time on “Schlep Blindness”. He talks about how there are great startup ideas that no one considers because they are too much of a “schlep” (a tedious unpleasant task). He...
This is yet another outstanding post by Paul Graham, this time on “Schlep Blindness”. He talks about how there are great startup ideas that no one considers because they are too much of a “schlep” (a tedious unpleasant task). He...
Jacob Hartog writes the following in reaction to my post on the use of value-added modeling for teacher assessment: What I [Hartog] think has been inadequately discussed is the use of individual model specifications to assign these teacher ratings, rather than the zone of agreement across a broad swath of model specifications. For example, the [...]
A look at return variability for portfolio changes. The problem Suppose we make some change to our portfolio. At a later date we can see if that change was good or bad for the portfolio return. Say, for instance, that it helped by 16 basis points. How do we properly account for variability in that … Continue reading →
