## Coupling of particle filters: likelihood curves

July 19, 2016
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$Coupling of particle filters: likelihood curves$

Hi! In this post, I’ll write about coupling particle filters, as proposed in our recent paper with Fredrik Lindsten and Thomas B. Schön from Uppsala University, available on arXiv; and also in this paper by colleagues at NUS. The paper is about a methodology with multiple direct consequences. In this first post, I’ll focus on correlated likelihood estimators; in a later […]

## No, Google will not “sway the presidential election”

July 19, 2016
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Grrr, this is annoying. A piece of exaggerated science reporting hit PPNAS and was promoted in Politico, then Kaiser Fung and I shot it down (“Could Google Rig the 2016 Election? Don’t Believe the Hype”) in our Daily Beast column last September. Then it appeared again this week in a news article in the Christian […] The post No, Google will not “sway the presidential election” appeared first on Statistical…

## Moving statistical theory from a “discovery” framework to a “measurement” framework

July 18, 2016
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Avi Adler points to this post by Felix Schönbrodt on “What’s the probability that a significant p-value indicates a true effect?” I’m sympathetic to the goal of better understanding what’s in a p-value (see for example my paper with John Carlin on type M and type S errors) but I really don’t like the framing […] The post Moving statistical theory from a “discovery” framework to a “measurement” framework appeared…

## The HAC Emperor has no Clothes: Part 2

July 18, 2016
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The time-series kernel-HAC literature seems to have forgotten about pre-whitening. But most of the action is in the pre-whitening, as stressed in my earlier post. In time-series contexts, parametric allowance for good-old ARMA-GARCH disturbances (with ...

## On deck this week

July 18, 2016
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Mon: Moving statistical theory from a “discovery” framework to a “measurement” framework Tues: Bayesian Linear Mixed Models using Stan: A tutorial for psychologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists Wed: Going beyond confidence intervals Thurs: Ioannidis: “Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Hijacked” Fri: What’s powdery and comes out of a metallic-green cardboard can? Sat: “The Dark Side of […] The post On deck this week appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…

## What happened when I was forced to wait 30 minutes for the subway

July 18, 2016
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What happened when I was forced to wait 30 minutes for the subway: pondering how easy it is for data analysts to get fooled by bad data

## Color markers in a scatter plot by a third variable in SAS

July 18, 2016
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One of my favorite new features in PROC SGPLOT in SAS 9.4m2 is addition of the COLORRESPONSE= and COLORMODEL= options to the SCATTER statement. By using these options, it is easy to color markers in a scatter plot so that the colors indicate the values of a continuous third variable. […] The post Color markers in a scatter plot by a third variable in SAS appeared first on The DO…

## Teachers and resource providers – uneasy bedfellows

July 18, 2016
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Trade stands and cautious teachers It is interesting to provide a trade stand at a teachers’ conference. Some teachers are keen to find out about new things, and come to see how we can help them. Others studiously avoid eye-contact … Continue reading →

## Not So Standard Deviations Episode 18 – Divide by n-1, or n-2, or Whatever

July 18, 2016
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Hilary and I talk about statistical software in fMRI analyses, the differences between software testing differences in proportions (a must listen!), and a preview of JSM 2016. Also, Hilary and I have just published a new book, Conversations on Data Sc...

## “Pointwise mutual information as test statistics”

July 17, 2016
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Christian Bartels writes: Most of us will probably agree that making good decisions under uncertainty based on limited data is highly important but remains challenging. We have decision theory that provides a framework to reduce risks of decisions under uncertainty with typical frequentist test statistics being examples for controlling errors in absence of prior knowledge. […] The post “Pointwise mutual information as test statistics” appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…

## Mittag-Leffler function and probability distribution

July 17, 2016
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The Mittag-Leffler function is a generalization of the exponential function. Since k!= Γ(k + 1), we can write the exponential function’s power series as and we can generalize this to the Mittag-Leffler function which reduces to the exponential function when α = β = 1. There are a few other values of α and β for […]

## You can post social science papers on the new SocArxiv

July 17, 2016
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I learned about it from this post by Elizabeth Popp Berman. The temporary SocArxiv site is here. It is connected to the Open Science Framework, which we’ve heard a lot about in discussions of preregistration. You can post your papers at SocArxiv right away following these easy steps: Send an email to the following address(es) […] The post You can post social science papers on the new SocArxiv appeared first…

## Bigmilk strikes again

July 16, 2016
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The post Bigmilk strikes again appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

## One-day workshop on causal inference (NYC, Sat. 16 July)

July 15, 2016
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James Savage is teaching a one-day workshop on causal inference this coming Saturday (16 July) in New York using RStanArm. Here’s a link to the details: One-day workshop on causal inference Here’s the course outline: How do prices affect sales? What is the uplift from a marketing decision? By how much will studying for an […] The post One-day workshop on causal inference (NYC, Sat. 16 July) appeared first on…

## Replin’ ain’t easy: My very first preregistration

July 15, 2016
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I’m doing my first preregistered replication. And it’s a lot of work! We’ve been discussing this for awhile—here’s something I published in 2013 in response to proposals by James Moneghan and by Macartan Humphreys, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, and Peter van der Windt for preregistration in political science, here’s a blog discussion (“Preregistration: what’s […] The post Replin’ ain’t easy: My very first preregistration appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…

## Finish line (nearly)

July 15, 2016
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We are very close to the finish line \$-\$ that's being able to finally submit the BCEA book to the editor (Springer).This has been a rather long journey, but I think the current version (I dread using the word "final" just yet...) is very good, I think....

## the curious incident of the inverse of the mean

July 14, 2016
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A s I figured out while working with astronomer colleagues last week, a strange if understandable difficulty proceeds from the simplest and most studied statistical model, namely the Normal model x~N(θ,1) Indeed, if one reparametrises this model as x~N(υ⁻¹,1) with υ>0, a single observation x brings very little information about υ! (This is not a […]

## About that claim that police are less likely to shoot blacks than whites

July 14, 2016
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Josh Miller writes: Did you see this splashy NYT headline, “Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings”? It’s actually looks like a cool study overall, with granular data, and a ton of leg work, and rich set of results that extend beyond the attention grabbing headline that is […] The post About that claim that police are less likely to shoot blacks than…

## That’s like so random! Monte Carlo for Data Science

July 14, 2016
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Another great turnout at the DataPhilly meetup last night. Was great to see all you random data nerds! Code snippets to generate animated examples here.

## Enriching mathematics with statistics

July 14, 2016
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Statistics enriches everything! In many school systems in the world, subjects are taught separately. In primary school, children  learn reading and writing, maths and social studies at different times of the day. But more than that, many topics within subjects … Continue reading →

## The Bits Are Rotting in the State of Data Journalism

July 14, 2016
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News articles are an incredibly important source of historical information. Online media and interactive pieces are much more at risk of breaking or disappearing, at least in theory. Well, it's not just theory. A quick look around shows a number of even fairly recent pieces in major publications that are broken today. The screenshot above is from … Continue reading The Bits Are Rotting in the State of Data Journalism

## Notes from the Kölner R meeting, 9 July 2016

July 13, 2016
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Last Thursday the Cologne R user group came together again. This time, our two speakers arrived from Bavaria, to talk about Spark and R Server.Introduction to Apache SparkDownload slidesDubravko Dulic gave an introduction to Apache Spark and why Spark ...

## Of polls and prediction markets: More on #BrexitFail

July 13, 2016
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David “Xbox poll” Rothschild and I wrote an article for Slate on how political prediction markets can get things wrong. The short story is that in settings where direct information is not easily available (for example, in elections where polls are not viewed as trustworthy forecasts, whether because of problems in polling or anticipated volatility […] The post Of polls and prediction markets: More on #BrexitFail appeared first on Statistical…