OK, here’s a paper with a true theorem but then some false corollaries. First the theorem: The above is actually ok. It’s all true. But then a few pages later comes the false statement: This is just wrong, for two reasons. First, the relevant reference distribution is discrete uniform, not continuous uniform, so the normal […] The post Bigshot statistician keeps publishing papers with errors; is there anything we can…
I was checking out Stephen Wolfram’s blog and found this excellent obituary of Solomon Golomb, the mathematician who invented the maximum-length linear-feedback shift register sequence, characterized by Wolfram as “probably the single most-used mathematical algorithm idea in history.” But Golomb is probably more famous for inventing polyominoes. The whole thing’s a good read, and it […] The post Wolfram on Golomb appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
Kaiser Fung shares an amusing story of how you can be misled by analyzing data that you haven’t fully digested. Kaiser writes, “It pains me to think how many people have analyzed this dataset, and used these keywords to build models.”...
Here’s the roundup for this past week. Michael Betancourt added case studies for methodology in both Python and R, based on the work he did getting the ML meetup together: RStan workflow PyStan workflow Michael Betancourt, along with Mitzi Morris, Sean Talts, and Jonah Gabry taught the women in ML workshop at Viacom in NYC […] The post Stan Weekly Roundup, 28 July 2017 appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
It’s Sunday, and I [Bob] am just sitting on the couch peacefully ggplotting to illustrate basic sample spaces using spinners (a trick I’m borrowing from Jim Albert’s book Curve Ball). There’s an underlying continuous outcome (i.e., where the spinner lands) and a quantization into a number of regions to produce a discrete outcome (e.g., “success” […] The post Animating a spinner using ggplot2 and ImageMagick appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
In statistical work, design and data analysis are often considered separately. Sometimes we do all sorts of modeling and planning in the design stage, only to analyze data using simple comparisons. Other times, we design our studies casually, even thoughtlessly, and then try to salvage what we can using elaborate data analyses. It would be […] The post Hey—here are some tools in R and Stan to designing more effective…
Holiday weekend, schmoliday weekend. Ben Goodrich and Jonah Gabry shipped RStan 2.16.2 (their numbering is a little beyond base Stan, which is at 2.16.0). This reintroduces error reporting that got lost in the 2.15 refactor, so please upgrade if you want to debug your Stan programs! Joe Haupt translated the JAGS examples in the second […] The post Stan Weekly Roundup, 7 July 2017 appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
Bob explains: A pull request (PR) is the minimal publishable unit of open-source development. It’s a proposed change to the code base that we can then review. If you want to see how the sausage is made, follow this link. If you click on “files changed”, you’ll see what Sean is proposing doing with the […] The post What is a pull request? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…
Here’s some things that have been going on with Stan since the last week’s roundup Stan® and the logo were granted a U.S. Trademark Registration No. 5,222,891 and a U.S. Serial Number: 87,237,369, respectively. Hard to feel special when there were millions of products ahead of you. Trademarked names are case insensitive and they required […] The post Stan Weekly Roundup, 30 June 2017 appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
Rudy Malka writes: I think you’ll enjoy this nice piece of pop regression by David Robinson: developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs. I’d like to know your opinion about it. At the above link, Robinson discusses a survey that allows him to compare salaries of software developers who use […] The post “Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs”…
