## Improved icons for Bayesian and frequentist analysis

February 14, 2014
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This post presents icons that attempt to capture the essence of Bayesian and frequentist analysis. There are four icons: Bayesian and frequentist approaches to decisions about null values, and Bayesian and frequentist approaches to parameter estimation...

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## SharpER, Connecting R to Excel

February 14, 2014
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I have for sometime used the statistical package R  for the majority of data analysis tasks. Typically though data is sent as an Excel file, which is straight froward to import into R but often I want to have a quick look at the data to get a feel for...

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## The popularity of certain baby names is falling off the clifffffffffffff

February 14, 2014
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Ubs writes: I was looking at baby name data last night and I stumbled upon something curious. I follow the baby names blog occasionally but not regularly, so I’m not sure if it’s been noticed before. Let me present it like this: Take the statement… Of the top 100 boys and top 100 girls names, […]The post The popularity of certain baby names is falling off the clifffffffffffff appeared first…

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## Googling errors

February 14, 2014
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@roguelynn tweeted the other day: If attendees of this weekend’s intro to python workshop leave with one thing, it’ll be to Google your error messages first and foremost. I had just talked about the technique in my Tools for Reproducible Research course, and I had a few recent examples. Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: I […]

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## CmdStan, RStan, PyStan v2.2.0

February 14, 2014
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The Stan Development Team is happy to announce CmdStan, RStan, and PyStan v2.2.0. As usual, more info is available on the Stan Home Page. This is a minor release with a mix of bug fixes and features. For a full list of changes, please see the v2.2.0 milestone on stan-dev/stan’s issue tracker. Some of the […]The post CmdStan, RStan, PyStan v2.2.0 appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…

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## An example of why data will not end debate

February 14, 2014
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One oft-repeated "self-evident" tenet of Big Data is that data end all debate. Except if you have ever worked for a real company (excluding those ruled by autocrats), and put data on the table, you know that the data do not end anything. Reader Ben M. sent me to this blog post by Benedict Evans, showing a confusing chart showing how Apple has "passed" Microsoft. Evans used to be a…

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## More on Writing, Guest Post

February 14, 2014
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This from Dr. Robert Bolan of the LAGLC.  I agree with Rob’s choices of writing references. Strunk & White and Zinnser are indispensable and, perhaps not so surprisingly, they are written well enough so they actually can be read and not only use...

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## Sure thing principle

February 13, 2014
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I've been a bit busy lately \$-\$ teaching, plus other more or less interesting things (well: some really interesting, some much less so) \$-\$ and thus I haven't really written many posts recently. But I still try to check my own blog roll to see whether ...

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## Congratulations to Loretta Mester, New President of The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

February 13, 2014
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Loretta is presently the Director of Research at the Philadelphia Fed, and she will replace Cleveland's Sandra Pianalto effective June 1. She has been a stunningly effective research director in Philadelphia; indeed her loss is a terrible blow to FRB P...

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## How we Spend: Presenting Economic Statistics as a Narrative Infographic

February 13, 2014
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How We Spend [bloomberg.com] by Matthew C. Klein of Bloomberg Visual Data is narrative and visually engaging "interactive infographic" of nevertheless dry and boring data. The full-window infographic consists of a collection of interactive line graph...

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## The World of Statistics

February 13, 2014
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Many of you will know that 2013 was "The Year of Statistics". A large number of special events celebrated this fact. What you may not know is that the "Statistics2013 organisation has now been transformed into "The World of Statistics".This recent piec...

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## Data, Datum

February 13, 2014
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Ce soir, je quitte ma cabane d’ermite pour intervenir dans la conférence Big Data: Big Brother organisé au Cœur des Sciences, où un peu plus de trois cent personnes se sont inscrites en quelques heures. On va parler de data. Et depuis, je me ...

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## loess explained in a GIF

February 13, 2014
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Local regression (loess) is one of the statistical procedures I most use. Here is a movie showing how it works

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## Hat tip to the Times editors

February 13, 2014
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While I wasn't happy with how the New York Times business page covered the recent unemployment report (link), I was pleasantly surprised to see this editorial today titled "Making College Pay". Here are the key sentences: The recent jobless rate for college graduates ages 25 and older was 3.2 percent, and their median pay at full-time, full-year jobs was \$75,300 for men and \$53,700 for women. That is a far…

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## R: Animating 2D and 3D plots

February 13, 2014
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One great package in R is the animation made by Yihui Xie. And just for fun, we are going to explore that. Our aim is to create simple animated 2D and 3D plots. Here is the first one, 2D of courseThe code,It's a piece of cake right? The function we use...

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## Stopping rules and Bayesian analysis

February 13, 2014
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I happened to receive two questions about stopping rules on the same day. First, from Tom Cunningham: I’ve been arguing with my colleagues about whether the stopping rule is relevant (a presenter disclosed that he went out to collect more data because the first experiment didn’t get significant results) — and I believe you have […]The post Stopping rules and Bayesian analysis appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…

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## A message worth repeating

February 13, 2014
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When you see two time series, resist the temptation to plot them as lines on the same chart. According to the Atlantic, the following dual-axis chart has been making the rounds in the investment community: (thanks to Alberto Cairo for...

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## Registration for the 2014 ‘R in Insurance’ conference has opened

February 13, 2014
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The registration for the second conference on R in Insurance on Monday 14 July 2014 at Cass Business School in London has opened. This one-day conference will focus again on applications in insurance and actuarial science that use R, the lingua franca ...

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## A Significantly Improved Significance Test. Not!

February 13, 2014
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It is my great pleasure to share with you a breakthrough in statistical computing. There are many statistical tests: the t-test, the chi-squared test, the ANOVA, etc. I here present a new test, a test that answers the question researchers are most an...

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## Bayesian Model Selection – A Worked Example

February 12, 2014
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Choosing between non-nested models can be challenging. A lot of statisticians and econometricians find that a Bayesian approach has a lot to offer when it comes to addressing this challenge. I'm certainly of that view myself.Let me take you through an ...

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## Bayes factor t tests, part 1

February 12, 2014
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In my first post, I described the general logic of Bayes factors. I will continue discussing the general logic of Bayes factor, while introducing some of the basic functionality of the BayesFactor package.Recap: What is a Bayes factor?The Bayes factor is the relative evidence provided by the data for comparing two statistical models. It has two equivalent definitions:The Bayes factor is the relative predictive success between two hypotheses: it is…

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## Temperatures Series as Random Walks

February 12, 2014
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Last year, I did mention in a post that unit-root tests are dangerous, because they might lead us to strange models. For instance, in a post, I did obtain that the temperature observed in January 2013, in Montréal, might be considered as a random walk process (or at leat an integrated process). The code to extract the data has changed (since the website has been updated), so here, we use…

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## Unit Root Tests

February 12, 2014
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$(Y_t)$

This week, in the MAT8181 Time Series course, we’ve discussed unit root tests. According to Wold’s theorem, if is  (weakly) stationnary then where is the innovation process, and where  is some deterministic series (just to get a result as general as possible). Observe that as discussed in a previous post. To go one step further, there is also the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition : an integrated of order one process, defined as…

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