## Slick time series decomposition of the birthdays data

June 19, 2012
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Aki updates: Here is my plot using the full time series data to make the model. Data analysis could be made in many different ways, but my hammer is Gaussian process, and so I modeled the data with a Gaussian process with six components 1) slowly changing trend 2) 7 day periodical component capturing day [...]

## A statistician reads the newspaper: The Secret Service scandal

June 19, 2012
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This past weekend was Father's Day, so I took some time to relax and read the newspaper. I found several stories that suggested interesting statistical questions. Unfortunately, the data are not available for analysis. Nevertheless, the stories are worth sharing. Over the next few days, I'll post my thoughts on [...]

## Dynamical systems in R with simecol

June 19, 2012
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This evening I will talk about Dynamical systems in R with simecol at the LondonR meeting. Thanks to the work by Thomas Petzoldt, Karsten Rinke, Karline Soetaert and R. Woodrow Setzer it is really straight forward to model and analyse dynamical system...

## Microsoft Surface : Bigger than Windows 8 and Bing

June 19, 2012
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I've been reading the coverage on the new Microsoft tablet launch - the very cool looking Surface. Over on track // microsoft, the twitter buzz seems pretty hot. I note that the main cluster around the launch has perhaps the...

## Methods that get used

June 18, 2012
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I have a conjecture regarding statistical methods: The probability of a method being used drops by at least a factor of 2 for every parameter that has to be determined by trial-and-error. A method could have a dozen inputs, and…Read more ›

## A Few Hours of Joy at Eyeo

June 18, 2012
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I stopped in at the Eyeo Festival last week. Unfortunately, I had only a few hours to spend, but managed to take in some great talks including Stephanie Posavec, Wes Grubbs, Zach Lieberman, and also participated in the Data Visualization and Social Ju...

## Tracking US Sentiments Over Time In Wikileaks

June 18, 2012
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Introduction I recently posted about using the Wikileaks cable corpus to find word use patterns, both over time, and in secret cables vs unclassified cables. I received a lot of good suggestions for further topics to pursue with the corpus, and probab...

## Tracking US Sentiments Over Time In Wikileaks

June 18, 2012
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Introduction I recently posted about using the Wikileaks cable corpus to find word use patterns, both over time, and in secret cables vs unclassified cables. I received a lot of good suggestions for further topics to pursue with the corpus, Continue reading →

## Tracking US Sentiments Over Time In Wikileaks

June 18, 2012
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Introduction I recently posted about using the Wikileaks cable corpus to find word use patterns, both over time, and in secret cables vs unclassified cables. I received a lot of good suggestions for further topics to pursue with the corpus, and probabl...

## Pro Tips for Grad Students in Statistics/Biostatistics (Part 1)

June 18, 2012
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I just finished teaching a Ph.D. level applied statistical methods course here at Hopkins. As part of the course, I gave one “pro-tip” a day; something I wish I had learned in graduate school that has helped me in becoming a practicing appl...

## Pro Tips for Grad Students in Statistics/Biostatistics (Part 1)

June 18, 2012
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I just finished teaching a Ph.D. level applied statistical methods course here at Hopkins. As part of the course, I gave one “pro-tip” a day; something I wish I had learned in graduate school that has helped me in becoming a practicing appl...

## George Casella

June 18, 2012
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Today I learned that my dear friend George Casella has passed away. George is well known for many things: his influential textbooks, his research on decision theory, his research on MCMC, his good statistical sense, his service work, his crystal clear lectures, … I could go on and on. But there was something else about [...]

## Example 9.35: Discrete randomization and formatted output

June 18, 2012
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A colleague asked for help with randomly choosing a kid within a family. This is for a trial in which families are recruited at well-child visits, but in each family only one of the children having a well-child visit that day can be in the study. The...

## Hierarchical modeling as a framework for extrapolation

June 18, 2012
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Phil recently posted on the challenge of extrapolation of inferences to new data. After telling the story of a colleague who flat-out refused to make predictions from his model of buildings to new data, Phil wrote, “This is an interesting problem because it is sort of outside the realm of statistics, and into some sort [...]

## A statistically beautiful Father’s Day

June 18, 2012
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To celebrate special occasions like Father's Day, I like to relax with a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. When I looked at the weather page, I was astonished by the seeming uniformity of temperatures across the contiguous US. The weather map in my newspaper was almost entirely yellow [...]

## Causation

June 18, 2012
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$Causation$

—Larry Wasserman In this post, I will discuss something elementary yet important. Causation versus Association. Although it is well-worn territory, the topic of causation still causes enormous confusion. The media confuse correlation and causation all the time. In fact, it is common to see a reporter discuss a study, warn the listener that the result [...]

June 17, 2012
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Rounding is more difficult than first appears. It appears straight-forward. To round a number you decide how many decimal places or significant figures you need then you look one digit further to see whether the final digit stays the same … Continue reading →

## Sunday data/statistics link roundup (6/17)

June 17, 2012
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Happy Father’s Day! A really interesting read on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and public policy. The examples in the boxes are fantastic. This seems to be one of the cases where the public policy folks are borrowing ideas from Biostatistic...

## Sunday data/statistics link roundup (6/17)

June 17, 2012
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Happy Father’s Day! A really interesting read on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and public policy. The examples in the boxes are fantastic. This seems to be one of the cases where the public policy folks are borrowing ideas from Biostatistic...

## How to make a good fig?

June 17, 2012
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Joshua Vogelstein writes: Are you aware of a paper the explains current best practice of figure generation, in general? i’m thinking things like: have legends and labels that are legible, etc. seems like you or hadley shoulda written some such thing by now…. My reply: A couple of sources I can think of are: one [...]

## Why You Shouldn’t Conclude "No Effect" from Statistically Insignificant Slopes

June 16, 2012
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It is quite common in political science for researchers to run statistical models, find that a coefficient for a variable is not statistically significant, and then claim that the variable "has no effect." This is equivalent to proposing a research hyp...

## The Art of Fielding

June 16, 2012
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I liked it; the reviews were well-deserved. It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. As I noted a few years ago, Indecision was notable in that [...]

## Carnon [and Core, end]

June 15, 2012
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Yet another full day working on Bayesian Core with Jean-Michel in Carnon… This morning, I ran along the canal for about an hour and at last saw some pink flamingos close enough to take pictures (if only to convince my daughter that there were flamingos in the area!). Then I worked full-time on the spatial [...]