Following the posting on arXiv of the Statistical Science paper of Carvalho et al., and the publication by the same authors in Bayesian Analysis of Particle Learning for general mixtures I noticed on Hedibert Lopes’ website his rejoinder to the discussion of his Valencia 9 paper has been posted. Since the ... [Read more...]

José Bernardo forwaded this announcement that sounds quite attractive (conditional upon living in a remote part of Texas!) Senior Faculty Position in Computational Statistics At Texas A&M University As part of a recognition of the increasing importance in the modeling and computational sciences, the Department of Statistics at Texas ... [Read more...]

The fine bloggers (and R experts) at the Dataists have volunteered to answer questions about data analysis on Reddit: A few months ago, a group of likeminded folks in New York and the San Francisco Bay area decided it was time to start a blog about data, and we can ... [Read more...]

New York’s annual marathon took place yesterday. Watching a bit of it on television with my friends, I was struck by the much earlier starting time for women than men. Specifically, professional women started running yesterday at 9:10 AM, while professional men start running at 9:40 AM. (This information comes from ... [Read more...]

The CrossValidated Q&A site is now out of beta and the new design and site name is live. New design The new design looks great, thanks to Jin Yang, our designer-in-residence. Note the normal density icon for accepted answers and the site icon depicting a 5-fold cross-validation (light green ... [Read more...]

To quote from the preface to the first edition in Jeffreys (1961): ‘It is sometimes considered a paradox that the answer depends not only on the observations but on the question; it should be a platitude.’1 Generalized Linear Models : P. ... [Read more...]

The only thing I remember from courses I had in probability a few years ago is that we also have to clearly defined the event we want to calculate the probability. On the Freakonomics blog, last week, the Israeli lottery was mentioned (here, see a... [Read more...]

Keith Briggs published a post here on names of English place name element distribution, which contains almost twenty maps like the one where names ends by -bourn,bourne,burn (here) or -head (there). Actually, it is possible (Robin mentioned that a... [Read more...]

The latest version of my ABC slides is on slideshare. To conclude with a pun, I took advantage of the newspaper clipping generator once pointed out by Andrew. (Note that nothing written in the above should be taken seriously.) On the serious side, I managed to cover most of the 300 ... [Read more...]

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50 days ago, I published a post, here, on forecasting techniques. I was wondering what could be the probability to have, by the end of this year, one million pages viewed (from Google Analytics) on this blog. Well, initially, it was on my blog at t... [Read more...]

R is the lingua franca of Statistics: R code and R packages is the means by which statisticians communicate ideas and methods for statistical analysis. The reasons why are discussed in this article, but it also begs the question: what's wrong with the spoken or written word? How Statistics and ... [Read more...]

An interesting suduko-like puzzle for this week puzzle in Le Monde thi A 10×10 grid is filled by a random permutation of {0,…,99}. The 4 largest figures in each row are coloured in yellow and the 4 largest values in each column are coloured in red. What is the range of the number of ... [Read more...]

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It’s not a good idea to annoy the referees of your paper. They make recommendations to the editor about your work and it is best to keep them happy. There is an interesting discussion on stats.stackexchange.com on this subject. This inspired my own list below. Explain what ... [Read more...]

Michael Blum and Olivier François, along with Katalin Csillery, just released an R package entitled abc. (I am surprised the name was not already registered!) Its aim is obviously to implement ABC approximations for Bayesian inference: Description The ’abc’ package provides various functions for parameter estimation and model selection ... [Read more...]

As a quick note, here are two R packages that were mentioned to me recently and that look promising: reldist and mixtools. [Read more...]

Apparently today is the first ever World Statistics Day. I only knew about it because I'd seen a couple of passing references to it from the stats folks I follow on Twitter. But I guess this UN-sponsored event is a big deal, judging from the official website: The celebration of ... [Read more...]