Here are the 14 slides I used during my talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings 2011: shotwell-jsm-2011.pdf. I'm trying hard to minimize the text in my presentation slides. But, this usually requires that I practice more. Hence, you will know which talks I have practiced thoroughly by the amount of text ... [Read more...]

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At the JSM 2011 conference in Miami earlier this week, we conducted an informal poll of attendees on their attitudes to respect to Big Data, statistical software, and data science. JSM is the largest gathering of statisticians in North America, and attendees were invited to complete a survey after logging into ... [Read more...]

Monday August 01 was the first full day of JSM 2011 and full is the appropriate word to describe the day! It started for me at 7am with a round table run by Marc Suchard on parallel computing (or at 3am if I am considering the time I woke up!). I was ... [Read more...]

Peter writes: I wonder if part of the drop off is live bloggers moving to platforms like Twitter? I can tell you it seemed like there were almost as many tweets for one SIG (#bosc2011) as for the whole of #ISMB / #ECCB2011, and I personally didn’t post anything to ... [Read more...]

One of the recurring frustrations in data analytics is that your data is never in the right shape. Worst case: you are not aware of this and every step you attempt is more expensive, less reliable and less informative than you would want. Best case: you notice this and have ... [Read more...]

This week, the puzzle from the weekend edition of Le Monde was easy to state: in the sequence (8+17n), is there a 6th power? a 7th? an 8th? If so, give the first occurrence. So I first wrote an R code for a function testing whether an integer is any ... [Read more...]

The wordcloud package is word clouds for R with a difference: they look great. Of course, having just analysed online coverage of the ISMB conference, I had to run all 6 906 comments from the 2008-2011 meetings through some code. If you followed along via the Sweave code, I went as far ... [Read more...]

Despite not enjoying this year the optimal environment of CiRM, we are still making good progress on the revision (or the R vision) of Bayesian Core. In the past two days, we went over Chapters 1 (Introduction), 2 (Normal Models), 5 (Capture-Recapture Experiments), and 6 (Mixture Models), with Chapters 3 (Regression), 4 (Generalised Linear Models) [...] [Read more...]

ISMB/ECCB 2011 was held between July 15-19 this year and as in previous years, FriendFeed was used to cover the meeting. Last year, I wrote a post about how to use R to analyse the coverage. I was planning something similar for 2011 when I thought: we have 4 years of ISMB ... [Read more...]

Peng Yu sent me an email about the conditions for convergence of a Gibbs sampler: The following statement mentions convergence. But I’m not familiar what the regularity condition is. “But it is necessary to have a finite probability of moving away from the current state at all times in ... [Read more...]

Jean-Michel (aka Jean-Claude!) Marin came for a few days so that we could make late progress on the revision of our book Bayesian Core towards an Use R! version. In one of the R programs in the mixture chapter, we were getting improbable answers, until we found an R mistake ... [Read more...]

Scrabble is a game that involves both skill and luck. There's skill in knowing the words you can play and — especially — the most advantageous ways to play them. But there's also luck in the tiles you draw randomly from the bag: get saddled with a rack containing four I's and ... [Read more...]

Shravan Vasishth has written a response to my review both published on the Statistics Forum. His response is quite straightforward and honest. In particular, he acknowledges not being a statistician and that he “should spend more time studying statistics”. I also understand the authors’ frustration at trying “to recruit several ... [Read more...]

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I just got the following email from PNAS about our Lack of confidence in ABC model choice. Editor's Remarks to Author: both referees now find the manuscript acceptable for publication as do I. Each suggests small changes which I encourage the authors to make prior to having the manuscript go ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, we had a meeting of our EMILE network on statistics for population genetics (in Montpellier) and we were discussing our respective recent advances in ABC model choice. One of our colleagues mentioned the constant request (from referees) to include the post-ABC processing devised by Fagundes et al. in their 2007 ... [Read more...]

“We have seen that a perfect correlation is perfectly linear, so an imperfect correlation will be `imperfectly linear’.” page 128 This book has been written by two linguists, Shravan Vasishth and Michael Broe, in order to teach statistics “in  areas that are traditionally not mathematically demanding” at a deeper level than ... [Read more...]

Yesterday's New York Times includes a great article on the failure of some genetic tests for cancer detection, and the flaws in the research that led to them. The article features quotes from Keith Baggerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, and includes a photo of him and colleague Kevin Coombes ... [Read more...]

Yesterday I posted a very simple math puzzle to Twitter that I found in Jonathan Baron’s book, Thinking and Deciding. The puzzle is the following: Show that every number of the form ABC,ABC is divisible by 13. The puzzle comes up in Baron’s book as an example of ... [Read more...]