## Inverting your very own matrix

July 14, 2013
By

Introduction I had my natural predilection towards math crushed out of me at some point in school, and after that point, Math (yes, we are referring to the higher power of math) and I had a wary understanding. I dabbled quietly, and Math turned a blind eye to me ignoring some of its deeper theory. When I stuggled loudly, Math did its best to hide its smirks. I generally refrained…

## Inverting your very own matrix

July 14, 2013
By

Introduction I had my natural predilection towards math crushed out of me at some point in school, and after that point, Math (yes, we are referring to the higher power of math) and I had a wary understanding. I dabbled quietly, and Math turned a blind eye to me ignoring some of its deeper theory. When I stuggled loudly, Math did its best to hide its smirks. I generally refrained…

## Learning how to speak

July 14, 2013
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I’ve been trying to reduce my American accent when speaking French. I tried taping my voice and playing it back, but that didn’t help. I couldn’t actually tell that I had a strong accent by listening to myself. My own voice is just too familiar to me. Then Malecki told me about the international phonetic […]The post Learning how to speak appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…

## Inverting your very own matrix

July 14, 2013
By

Introduction I had my natural predilection towards math crushed out of me at some point in school, and after that point, Math (yes, we are referring to the higher power of math) and I had a wary understanding. I dabbled quietly, and Math turned a blind eye to me ignoring some of its deeper theory. When I stuggled loudly, Math did its best to hide its smirks. I generally refrained…

## useR 2013 was a blast!

July 14, 2013
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I had a great time at useR 2013 in Albacete, Spain. The food was great, the people were fun and the weather was hot. A pleasant surprise was that I won the useR data analysis contest with my submission “Modeling Match Results in La Liga Using a Hie...

## Rain in Netherlands during the past 100 years

July 14, 2013
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Climate has my interest. But discussions on climate change seem to be focused on temperature. In real life, we look at temperature, rain, sunshine and wind. I was therefor happy to find a load of rain data on Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute....

## Stephen Senn: Indefinite irrelevance

July 14, 2013
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Stephen Senn Head, Methodology and Statistics Group, Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS), Luxembourg At a workshop on randomisation I attended recently I was depressed to hear what I regard as hackneyed untruths treated as if they were important objections. One of these is that of indefinitely many confounders. The argument goes that although […]

## Zero to hero

July 13, 2013
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Recently, I've been working on a paper, which I think is coming along nicely. The basic problem is like this: in a health economic evaluation, sometimes data are collected on a sample of individuals. Say, for example, that \$n_0\$ subjects are given a st...

## Meritocracy rerun

July 13, 2013
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I’ve said it here so often, this time I put it on the sister blog. . . . The post Meritocracy rerun appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

## LOST CAUSES IN STATISTICS II: Noninformative Priors

July 13, 2013
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$LOST CAUSES IN STATISTICS II: Noninformative Priors$

LOST CAUSES IN STATISTICS II: Noninformative Priors I thought I would post at a higher frequency in the summer. But I have been working hard to finish some papers which has kept me quite busy. So, apologies for the paucity of posts. Today I’ll discuss another lost cause: noninformative priors. I like to say that … … Continue reading →

## Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum

July 13, 2013
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Even if a policymaker is sure of the ideal economic policy, he or she can only implement it with the help of some of the other political players. But I’m saying something different, echoing what I wrote a couple days ago. I thought of this the other day after seeing this recent quote from Paul […]The post Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum appeared first on Statistical…

## Bayes : Python :: Frequentist : Perl

July 13, 2013
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Bayesian statistics is to Python as frequentist statistics is to Perl. Perl has the slogan “There’s more than one way to do it,” abbreviated TMTOWTDI and pronouced “tim toady.” Perl prides itself on variety. Python takes the opposite approach. The Zen of Python says “There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious […]

## Reflections on UseR! 2013

July 12, 2013
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This week I’ve been at the R Users conference in Albacete, Spain. These conferences are a little unusual in that they are not really about research, unlike most conferences I attend. They provide a place for people to discuss and exchange ideas on how R can be used. Here are some thoughts and highlights of the conference, in no particular order. Håvard Rue spoke on Bayesian computing with INLA and…

## From Whale Calls to Dark Matter: Competitive Data Science with R and Python

July 12, 2013
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Back in June I gave a fun talk at Montreal Python on some of my dabbling in the competitive data science scene. The good people at Savior-fair Linux recorded the talk and have edited it all together into a pretty slick video. If you can spare twenty-minutes or so, have a look. If you want […]

## “A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”

July 12, 2013
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Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . […]The post “A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses” appeared first on Statistical…

## Course Materials from useR! 2013 R/Bioconductor for Analyzing High-Throughput Genomic Data

July 12, 2013
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At last week's 2013 useR! conference in Albacete, Spain, Martin Morgan and Marc Carlson led a course on using R/Bioconductor for analyzing next-gen sequencing data, covering alignment, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, and sequence annotation using R. The course mate...

## Path storage in the particle filter

July 12, 2013
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Hey particle lovers, With Lawrence Murray and Sylvain Rubenthaler we looked at how to store the paths in the particle filter, and the related expected memory cost. We just arXived a technical report about it. Would you like to know more? Consider a particle filter with particles. At each step of the algorithm, positive weights […]

## Longer-history back-tests

July 12, 2013
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One of the important steps of evaluating new trading idea or strategy is to see how it behaved historically (i.e. create back-test and examine the equity curve in different economic and market conditions) However, creating a long back-test is usually problematic because most ETFs do not have a long price history. One way to alleviate […]

## Is Particle Physics Bad Science? (memory lane)

July 11, 2013
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Memory Lane: reblog July 11, 2012 (+ updates at the end).  I suppose[ed] this was somewhat of a joke from the ISBA, prompted by Dennis Lindley, but as I [now] accord the actual extent of jokiness to be only ~10%, I’m sharing it on the blog [i].  Lindley (according to O’Hagan) wonders why scientists require […]

## The Geiger Counter problem

July 11, 2013
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I am supposed to turn in the manuscript for Think Bayes next week, but I couldn't resist adding a new chapter.  I was adding a new exercise, based on an example from Tom Campbell-Ricketts, author of the Maximum Entropy blog. He got the idea from E...

## Yes, worry about generalizing from data to population. But multilevel modeling is the solution, not the problem

July 11, 2013
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A sociologist writes in: Samuel Lucas has just published a paper in Quality and Quantity arguing that anything less than a full probability sample of higher levels in HLMs yields biased and unusable results. If I follow him correctly, he is arguing that not only are the SEs too small, but the parameter estimates themselves […]The post Yes, worry about generalizing from data to population. But multilevel modeling is the…

## Climate change and duelling charts

July 11, 2013
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Abhinav asks me to check out his blog post on a chart on global warming (I prefer the term climate change) featured on Wonkblog. The chart is sourced to a report by the World Metereological Association (link to PDF). Hello,...

## Testing for Interaction in Logit Models

July 11, 2013
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Andrew Gelman recently posted about testing for interaction in logistic regression models. This is something I've read and thought a little about, so I'm linking to several articles on the topic and offering my quick take. The Debate in Political Science As far as I can tell, the debate started in political science when Wolfinger […]