Mattan S. Ben-Shachar wrote an excellent tutorial about how to impose ordering constraints in Bayesian regression models. In that post, the data comes from archaeology (Buck, 2017). We have samples from Layers in a site, and for each sample, we have a ...

Ho ho ho, it is the most wonderful time of the year: Advent of code! AOC is a yearly collection of programming puzzles throughout the first 25 days of December. I like it… so much so that I wrote an R package for completing my puzzles using the struct...

A videogame speedrun is a challenge to beat the game as quickly as possible. It’s time attack racing but for a videogame. There are, in my mind, two ways to make a run’s time go faster: Playing better and more smoothly (optimizations, having better luc...

Darren Dahly, username @statsepi, asked people on Twitter to share some of their favorite or least favorite data visualizations from the pandemic. I nominated the notorious “cubic fit” ‘forecast’ from the Council of Economic Advisers. But then there wa...

When I am showing off a plotting technique in ggplot2, I sometimes like to include the R code that produced the plot as part of the plot. Here is an example I made to demonstrate the debug parameter in element_text(): library(ggplot2) self_document( ...

I recently developed and released an R package called solarizeddocx. It provides solarizeddocx::document(), an RMarkdown output format for solarized-highlighted Microsoft Word documents . The image below shows a comparison of the solarizeddocx and the ...

A few weeks ago, I had a bad debugging session. The code was just not doing what I expected, and I went down a lot of deadends trying to fix or simplify things. I could not get the problem to happen in a reproducible example (reprex) or interactively (in RStudio). ...

In a previous post, I used simulations to estimate how long it would take to collect the unique Unowns in Pokemon Go! The message of the post was that we can use simulations to solve problems when the analytic solution is not clear or obvious. The curr...

For a long time, I’ve been curious about something. It is a truth I’ve seen casually dropped in textbooks, package documentation, and tweets: random effects and penalized smoothing splines are the same thing. It sounds so profound and enlightened. Wha...

One of the things I have come to appreciate is how programming is a great way to learn statistics. My eyes will glaze over at a series of equations in a derivation, but ask me to program the procedure and I’ll never forget how it works. This post will ...

In my last post, I walked through an intuition-building visualization I created to describe mixed-effects models for a nonspecialist audience. For that presentation, I also created an analogous visualization to introduce Bayes’ Theorem, so here I will walk through that figure.. As in the earlier post, let’s start by ...

Last week, I presented an analysis on the longitudinal development of intelligibility in children with cerebral palsy—that is, how well do strangers understand these children’s speech from 2 to 8 years old. My analysis used a Bayesian nonlinear mixed effects Beta regression model. If some models are livestock and some ...

I am happy to announce the release of ICC Bot, an app for computing interrater reliability scores using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). A screenshot of ICC Bot, an interactive app for computing intraclass correlation coefficients. The ICC statistic appears in repeated measures or multilevel modeling literature as a way ...

In this post, I walk through the code I used to make a nice diagram illustrating the parameters in a logistic growth curve. I made this figure for a conference submission. I had a tight word limit (600 words) and a complicated statistical method (Bayesian nonlinear mixed effects beta regression), so ...

Here’s the problem: I have some data with nested time series. Lots of them. It’s like there’s many, many little datasets inside my data. There are too many groups to plot all of the time series at once, so I just want to preview a handful of ...

There is a celebrated Commodore 64 program that randomly prints outs / and \ characters and fills the screen with neat-looking maze designs. It is just one line of code, but there is a whole book written about it.

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Screenshots of the 10 PRINT program in action. Images taken from the 10 PRINT book. ...