If you think of Dogecoin — the cryptocurrency based on a meme — you can’t help but also think of Elon Musk. That guy loves the doge, and every time he tweets about it, the price goes up. While we all know that correlation is not causation, we might s...

Dynamical systems theory provides a unifying framework for studying how systems as disparate as the climate and the behaviour of humans change over time. In this blog post, I provide an introduction to some of its core concepts. Since the study of dyna...

There is no doubt that, every now and then, one ought to celebrate life. This usually involves people coming together, talking, laughing, dancing, singing, shouting; simply put, it means throwing a party. With temperatures rising, summer offers all the more incentive to organize such a joyous event. Blinded by the ...

The COVID-19 pandemic will end only when a sufficient number of people have become immune, thus preventing future outbreaks. Principally, so-called exit strategies differ on whether immunity is achieved through natural infections, or whether it is achi...

Last summer, I wrote about love affairs and linear differential equations. While the topic is cheerful, linear differential equations are severely limited in the types of behaviour they can model. In this blog post, which I spent writing in self-quarantine to prevent further spread of SARS-CoV-2 — take that, cheerfulness — I ...

Writing blog posts has been one of the most rewarding experiences for me over the last year. Some posts turned out quite long, others I could keep more concise. Irrespective of length, however, I have managed to publish one post every month, and you can infer the occassional frenzy that ...

Causal inference goes beyond prediction by modeling the outcome of interventions and formalizing counterfactual reasoning. In this blog post, I provide an introduction to the graphical approach to causal inference in the tradition of Sewell Wright, Judea Pearl, and others. We first rehash the common adage that correlation is not ...

Bayesian inference using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be notoriously slow. In this blog post, we reframe Bayesian inference as an optimization problem using variational inference, markedly speeding up computation. We derive the variational objective function, implement coordinate ascent mean-field variational inference for a simple linear regression example in ...

If you are reading this, you are probably a Ravenclaw. Or a Hufflepuff. Certainly not a Slytherin … but maybe a Gryffindor? In this blog post, we let three subjective Bayesians predict the outcome of ten coin flips. We will derive prior predictions, evaluate their accuracy, and see how fortune favours ...

Differential equations are a powerful tool for modeling how systems change over time, but they can be a little hard to get into. Love, on the other hand, is humanity’s perennial topic; some even claim it is all you need. In this blog post — inspired by Strogatz (1988, 2015) — I will ...

Leonardo Bonacci, better known as Fibonacci, has influenced our lives profoundly. At the beginning of the $13^{th}$ century, he introduced the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Europe. Instead of the Roman numbers, where I stands for one, V for five, X for ten, and so on, the Hindu-Arabic numeral system uses ...

The number of storks and the number of human babies delivered are positively correlated (Matthews, 2000). This is a classic example of a spurious correlation which has a causal explanation: a third variable, say economic development, is likely to cause both an increase in storks and an increase in the number ...

Practice makes better. And faster. But what exactly is the relation between practice and reaction time? In this blog post, we will focus on two contenders: the power law and exponential function. We will implement these models in Stan and extend them to account for learning plateaus and the fact ...