Recent revelations about PRISM, the NSA’s massive program of surveillance of civilian communications have caused quite a stir. And rightfully so, as it appears that the agency has been granted warrantless direct access to just about any form of digital communication engaged in by American citizens, and that their access to such data has been […]
Read Part 1 When making a statement of the form “1/2 is the correct probability that this coin will land tails”, there are a few things which are left unsaid, but which are typically implied. The statement is one about the probability of an unknown event occurring, and it would seem reasonable to write this […]
I am currently working on a validation metric for binary prediction models. That is, models which make predictions about outcomes that can take on either of two possible states (eg Dead/not dead, heads/tails, cat in picture/no cat in picture, etc.) The most commonly used metric for this class of models is AUC, which assesses the […]
Reblogged from Zero to R Hero: Canadian Aquatic Invasive Species Networks Annual General Meeting in Kananaskis, Alberta. May 03, 3:25-5:30. This 2-hour workshop will focus on how and why we do numerical simulation in R. Time permitting, we will also look at how to build and fit likelihood based statistical models. We ask that you bring your […]
Whenever somebody mentions “The Simpsons” it always stirs up feelings of nostalgia in me. The characters, uproarious gags, zingy one-liners, and edgy animation all contributed towards making, arguably, the greatest TV ever. However, it’s easy to forget that as a TV show “The Simpsons” is still ongoing—in its twenty-fourth season no less. For me, and […]
I’ve been showing my new favourite toys to just about anyone foolish enough to actually engage me in conversation. I described how my shiny new set of non-transitive dice work here, complete with a map showing all the relevant probabilities. All was neat and tidy and wonderful until fellow ecologist, Aaron Ball, tried to burst [...]
I’ve been showing my new favourite toys to just about anyone foolish enough to actually engage me in conversation. I described how my shiny new set of non-transitive dice work here, complete with a map showing all the relevant probabilities. All was neat and tidy and wonderful until fellow ecologist, Aaron Ball, tried to burst […]
A very special package that I am rather excited about arrived in the mail recently. The package contained a set of 6-sided dice. These dice, however, don’t have the standard numbers one to six on their faces. Instead, they have assorted numbers between zero and nine. Here’s the exact configuration: Aside from maybe making for […]
Many of the posts in this blog have been concerned with using MCMC based methods for Bayesian inference. These methods are typically “exact” in the sense that they have the exact posterior distribution of interest as their target equilibrium distribution, but are obviously “approximate”, in that for any finite amount of computing time, we can […]
UPDATE: The day was great! There are many people doing really amazing things with open data and it was amazing to meet them. Here are my slides from the panel talk. Next Saturday, I’ll be sitting on a panel discussing future avenues for open data at ODX13. From the odx13 site: Odx13 is a mini-conference […]
