A colleague recently asked "why should the average get closer to the mean when we increase the sample size?" We should interpret this question as asking why the standard error of the mean gets smaller as n increases. The central limit theorem shows t...
This popular article references a report by financial consulting firms that makes a fairly convincing argument (even though they mostly neglect inferential statistics, and some parts of their argument are misleading, or otherwise not convincing) that 401(k) participants who accept "help" from financial experts take less risk and have better returns than those who do [...]
We don’t get many kids seeking candy at our house. I’m not sure if there just aren’t many kids in the neighborhood, or if it’s our location (next to the pond, with a big gap before the next house). I decided to keep track. As usual, we bought a huge bag of candy, and we […]
I saw this great infographic at Andrew Gelman’s blog. I’m inclined to buy an art print. Note the relationship between the central panel and the cover of the latest Amstat News (always a good source for embarrassing figures):
Antoniak's 1974 article titled Mixtures of Dirichlet Processes with Applications to Bayesian Nonparametric Problems (Annals of Statistics 2(6):1152-1174) is a fundamental work for most modern developments in this area. The article gives two expressions for the expected number of distinct values in a sample of size , drawn from a Dirichlet process-distributed probability distribution with [...]
One of the coolest R packages I heard about at the useR! Conference: Toby Dylan Hocking‘s directlabels package for putting labels directly next to the relevant curves or point clouds in a figure. I think I first learned about this idea from Andrew Gelman: that a separate legend requires a lot of back-and-forth glances, so [...]
I was at the useR! Conference at The University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, last week. My goal in going was to learn the latest things regarding (simple) dynamic graphics, (simple) web-based apps, parallel computing, and memory management (dealing with big data sets). I got just what I was hoping for and more. There are [...]
