## Sampling Distributions of t When Stopping Intention is Threshold Duration

July 18, 2012
By

Consider two groups of data on a metric scale, for which we want to conduct a t test. To compute the p value of t, we need to determine its sampling distribution, which is the relative probability of all possible values of t that would be obtained from...

## Gamification Quantification

July 18, 2012
By

Surveys become engaging when they become games, or at least, take on some of the characteristics of games.  This is the argument made by those advocating the gamification of marketing research [http://researchaccess.com/2011/12/market-researc...

## Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free

July 18, 2012
By

Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free: Online courses have been around for years, but now big-name colleges and competing software platforms have entered the field, which is evolving with astonishing speed.

## A closer look at data suggests Johns Hopkins is still the #1 US hospital

July 18, 2012
By

The US News best hospital 2012-20132 rankings are out. The big news is that Johns Hopkins has lost its throne. For 21 consecutive years Hopkins was ranked #1, but this year Mass General Hospital (MGH) took the top spot displacing Hopkins to #2. Howeve...

## The R packages in a data scientist’s toolbox

July 18, 2012
By

The following from Revolutions: John Myles White, self-described “statistics hacker” and co-author of “Machine Learning for Hackers” was interviewed recently by The Setup. In the interview, he describes his some of his go-to R packages for data science: Most of my work involves programming, so programming languages and their libraries are the bulk of the [...]

## Statistical Simulation

July 18, 2012
By

The basics of statistical simulation A statistical simulation often consists of the following steps: Simulate a random sample of size N from a statistical model. Compute a statistic for the sample. Repeat 1 and 2 many times and accumulate the results. Examine the union of the statistics, which approximates the sampling distribution of the statistic [...]

## Johns Hopkins Coursera Statistics Courses

July 18, 2012
By

Computing for Data Analysis Data Analysis Mathematical Biostatistics Bootcamp

## The treatment, the intermediate outcome, and the ultimate outcome: Leverage and the financial crisis

July 18, 2012
By

Gur Huberman points to an article on the financial crisis by Bethany McLean, who writes: lthough our understanding of what instigated the 2008 global financial crisis remains at best incomplete, there are a few widely agreed upon contributing factors. One of them is a 2004 rule change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that [...]

## Explanation or Prediction? An Amazing Quote from Phil Schrodt

July 18, 2012
By

I ran across a nice quote from Phil Schrodt on the virtue of explanation over prediction. It starts, "This is utterly, totally and completely self-serving bullshit...", and there is more. I encourage you to share this with others and contribute to the conversation at Explanation or Prediction? An Amazing Quote from Phil Schrodt, which first appeared at carlislerainey.com.For more of my thoughts and ideas, subscribe to my blog (via RSS…

## Simulation in SAS: The slow way or the BY way

July 18, 2012
By

Over the past few years, and especially since I posted my article on eight tips to make your simulation run faster, I have received many emails (often with attached SAS programs) from SAS users who ask for advice about how to speed up their simulation code. For this reason, I [...]

## Cats have nine lives and 72-hour days

July 18, 2012
By

So says this infographic (link). Reader John G. sent in an entire post, giving me a day off. Here's some light entertainment for mid-week. ***

## Universities Reshaping Education on the Web

July 17, 2012
By

Universities Reshaping Education on the Web: Major universities are joining Johns Hopkins, Princeton and others to expand Coursera, a venture that offers free massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

## Plotting the Frequency of Twitter Hashtag Usage Over Time with R and ggplot2

July 17, 2012
By

The 20th annual ISMB meeting was held over the last week in Long Beach, CA. It was an incredible meeting with lots of interesting and relevant talks, and lots of folks were tweeting the conference, usually with at least a few people in each concurrent ...

## Minimax Theory Saves The World

July 17, 2012
By
$Minimax Theory Saves The World$

Minimax theory is the best thing in statistical machine learning—or the worst— depending on your point of view. 1. The Basics of Minimaxity Let be a set of distributions. We observe . Let be a function of the distribution (like the mean of ). The minimax risk is where the infimum is over all estimators [...]

## opendata.ch 2012

July 17, 2012
By

Some good presentations from this year’s opendata.ch event in Zürich, Switzerland. Nigel Shadbolt on Open Data and Economy . Abraham …Continue reading »

## ScienceDaily – Getting to the Bottom of Statistics: Software Utilizes Data from the Internet for Interpreting Statistics

July 17, 2012
By

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2012) — Interpreting the results of statistical surveys, e.g., Transparency Internation­al's corruption indices, is not always a simple matter. As Dr. Heiko Paulheim of the Knowledge Engineering Group at the TU Darmstadt's Com...

## API and Apps: An example fom official statistics

July 17, 2012
By

An example of an API access to statistical data The U.S. Census Bureau  now offers some of its public data in machine-readable format. This is done via an Application Programming Interface (“API”). Based on this API an App has been developed helping to query data from the Cenus 2010: No data without legal clarification. The …Read More

## “Computing for Data Analysis” with R on coursera

July 17, 2012
By

Just stumbled on across a course on coursera titled “Computing for Data Analysis” taught by Roger D. Peng the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Here is the description of the course. In this course you will learn how to program in R and how to use R for effective data analysis. You will learn … Continue reading →

## Free Statistics Courses on Coursera

July 17, 2012
By

Today, we’re very excited to announce that the Biostatistics Department at Johns Hopkins is offering three new online courses through Coursera. These courses are Data Analysis: Data have never been easier or cheaper to come by. This course will cover...

## “Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.” — William James

July 17, 2012
By

Eric Tassone writes: Probably not blog-worthy/blog-appropriate, but have you heard Bill James discussing the Sandusky & Paterno stuff? I think you discussed once his stance on the Dowd Report, and this seems to be from the same part of his personality—which goes beyond contrarian . . . I have in fact blogged on James (many [...]

## Clarity about the Counterfactual when Discussing "Campaign Effects"

July 17, 2012
By

I examine the dispute between political scientists and journalists over the size of campaign effects, arguing that it stems from a misunderstanding of counterfactuals. I encourage you to share this with others and contribute to the conversation at Clarity about the Counterfactual when Discussing "Campaign Effects", which first appeared at carlislerainey.com.For more of my thoughts and ideas, subscribe to my blog (via RSS or Email) and follow me on Twitter.…

## Statistical Significance

July 17, 2012
By

Recently, p-value is a hot term due to the God particle. The following is from the post: The follow list summarizes five criticisms of significance testing as it is commonly practiced. Andrew Gelman: In reality, null hypotheses are nearly always false. Is drug A identically effective as drug B? Certainly not. You know before doing [...]

## Peter Grünwald: Follow-up on Cherkassky’s Comments

July 17, 2012
By

A comment from Professor Peter Grünwald Head, Information-theoretic Learning Group, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) Part-time full professor  at Leiden University. This is a follow-up on Vladimir Cherkassky’s comments on Deborah’s blog. First of all let me thank Vladimir for taking the time to clarify his position. Still, there’s one issue where we disagree and which, [...]

 Tweet

Email: