We all know that politicians can play it a little fast and loose with the truth. This is particularly true in debates, where politicians have to think on their feet and respond to questions from the audience or from each other.  Usually, we find out a... [Read more...]

  Here’s a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity.  Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This will be the last baby name related post but this came out of part two web scrapping post last month. I was looking for the fastest rising Names. I flip the logic and looked for the fastest declining names in relative popularity. Out of that exerci... [Read more...]

Transaction cost analysis (TCA) is the framework to achieve best execution in trading context. TCA can be split into three groups: pre-trade analysis, intraday analysis, and post-trade measurement. Pre-trade analysis allows us to get insight about the future volatility of the price, forecast intra-day and daily volumes, market impact. It ... [Read more...]

No need to do politics. Just take a statistical course. And I do not talk about misinterpretation of statistics, but I talk about the mathematical foundations of statistical tests. Consider the following parametric test, with a one-dimensional para... [Read more...]

Well, so much for that #march11 #Saudi day of rage.  Whether it was really the "tempest in a teacup" that  Prince Al-Waleed suggested on CNBC (video below, transcript here) or not, the oil complex and Saudi markets seem to have shrugged … Continue reading → [Read more...]

   I’ve been playing with Twitter data over the last week, archiving Algerian, Egyptian, Iranian, and Chinese tweets.  I thought I’d bring the story a little closer to home this time by archiving tweets from Wisconsin Union protesters on the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  Earlier this week, I posted a ~100k tweet dataset on the #25bahman protests in Iran.  The corresponding figure of frequencies showed a strong presence on Twitter, with over 500 tweets per 5 minute period at peak.  You can download the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

New in nerdery this week, it’s now a bit easier to install the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences that I put together (based on lots of great work by Phil Hagelberg and, more recently, Eric Schulte). In the past, the fact that AucTeX was both necessary and ... [Read more...]

After finishing the R prototype for data visualization, I've started abstracting the various methods necessary to create beautiful graphs. While there's no preliminary version of the R package yet, I think I've taken a number of exciting steps. These include: Abstracting graph objects. Objects such as lines, scatter plots, and ... [Read more...]

For those of you used to reading about international relations, I apologize for the following brief foray into American politics. It appears that the American Enterprise Institute and David Frum have decided to (abruptly) part ways. Before David left, however, he and his team of interns provided some interesting statistical ... [Read more...]

A little bit of churn relative to the House’s 1st shot at this but otherwise a remarkably similar vote, with an estimated cutpoint almost at the same place; see some raw R output, below the fold, after the thumbnail… y is the vote to take up the Senate amendments; ... [Read more...]

I added another plot to the output generated by my overnight ideal point scripts: a scatterplot of estimated Senate ideal points against Obama vote share in their state (color coded by party, local linear regression overlays by party, labels for some big residuals). I suppose I’m surprised by the ... [Read more...]

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