Panagiotis Petrou has posted a link to a recent paper of his, which develops a cost-effectiveness analysis of a drug used as a second-line treatment of renal carcinoma. The analysis is based on a Bayesian Markov model. But (from an incredibly self... [Read more...]

The other day I was having a quick look to the newspapers and I stumbled on this article. Apparently, Pornhub (a website whose mission should be pretty clear) have analysed the data on their customers and found out that the town of Ware (Hertfords... [Read more...]

I was really impressed by the very smooth process through which my paper on cost-effectiveness analysis in the presence of structural zero costs (which I've already mentioned for example here and here; the related R package is described here) has ... [Read more...]

Very shortly, I'll upload the newest release of BCEA, my R package to post-process the output of a (Bayesian) health economic model and produce systematic summaries (such as graphs and tables) for a full economic evaluation and probabilistic sensitivit... [Read more...]

As I was responding to the points raised by two referees and the editor on my paper on cost-effectiveness with structural zeros (the preliminary version was here, while I have presenting it in a few talks and discussed it here, here, here and here... [Read more...]

Despite the map here, I'm not going to talk about yet another fraction of the former Soviet Empire which is taken the form of a people's republic, possibly with witty British Ambassadors.In fact, I'm going to talk about the Stan workshop that I have be... [Read more...]

Last summer I have applied for a NIHR Research Methods fellowship. Earlier this week the results have come out and they have liked my proposal, which is of course great news. The idea of this project is to critically evaluate the stepped... [Read more...]

Recently, Yu-Sung Su and Masanao Yajima, the developers of the R2jags package, have released a new version (the current one is 0.03-11). As far as I understand it, one of the main changes is that since the update, R2jags no longer depend... [Read more...]

Today I've given the talk on the model for structural zeros and the related R package BCEs0 for the third time in three weeks (this time it was at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).Le Tour is going quite well, I think $-$ in... [Read more...]

Earlier today, Gareth has showed me a recent, interesting paper by Michael Sweeting (and colleagues). In the paper, Micheal et al describe their work on a R package to extend on the framework of the Continual Reassessment Method (the ori... [Read more...]

This Thursday I'll give a talk at the GSK Statistics Forum. Erika (with whom I shared a train journey to the 2012 BayesPharma and a group walk in Oxfordshire a few years back) now works at GSK and invited me. I will talk about the model for c... [Read more...]

Earlier today, I found some interesting data on Italian MPs voting records in the current parliament (which was opened last April). The data are available for both Houses (the Italian system has a lower house, called Camera $-$ effectively the same as the House of Commons in the UK $-$ ... [Read more...]

In a recent post, I had hinted at big news for BCEA $-$ I thought it was pretty much a done deal, but because it wasn't yet set in stone, I didn't want to jinx it...But now I've sorted all the details with Springer, who have asked me to ... [Read more...]

I know that updating a package too often is not quite good practice, so, given we've released BCEA 1.3-1 just about a month ago, this is way too soon to move forward. But between the last release and now, I've been doing some reading and have made some... [Read more...]

BCEs0 is the new R package I've written $-$ well, nearly finished to, anyway; it should be ready in version 1.0 in the next few days. The acronym stands for Bayesian models for Cost-Effectiveness with structural 0s, and it basically implements the mode... [Read more...]

Recently, I've been working on a paper, which I think is coming along nicely. The basic problem is like this: in a health economic evaluation, sometimes data are collected on a sample of individuals. Say, for example, that $n_0$ subjects are given a st... [Read more...]

Thank goodness, I think that even if this statistician business turns out badly, I can still make a living with rafting (if only by begging for money, in exchange for looking ridiculous in the swim suit)... As part as my brother's stag do, we went... [Read more...]

After months of work (although to be fair, we haven't worked 100% full time on this), Andrea and I are nearly ready to publish the next release of BCEA. Andrea has done a brilliant job and is responsible for most of the good new features (NB: see ... [Read more...]

Inspired by this post on R-bloggers, I decided to check how BCEA was doing. Unfortunately, it does not feature in the top 100 most downloaded R packages. However, I think it's doing well $-$ considering the book (which is the main medium of advertising of the package) has been out for ... [Read more...]

Marta and I are doing some re-analysis of our Eurovision contest (some context here and here). We have slightly modified our original model (mostly, I have navigated the mess in Marta's notation $-$ it's OK: I'm not at risk of her mighty wrath, as I've... [Read more...]