A million ? what are the odds…

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 the Université de Rennes 1 … Continue reading

The language of Statistics

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 … Continue reading

Le Monde puzzle [42]

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 … Continue reading

Bayesian Diabetes Projections by CDC

Bayesian methods are supporting decisions and news at the national level! The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention summarizes a report published in the journal Population Health Metrics. The news also made it to the national media. The report (JP Boyle, TJ Thompson, EW Gregg, LE Barker, and … Continue reading

Help! My model fits too well!

This is sort-of related to my sidelined study of graph algebra. I was thinking about data I could apply a first-order linear difference model to, and the stock market came to mind. After all, despite some black swan sized shocks, what better predicts a day’s closing than the previous … Continue reading

How to avoid annoying a referee

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 you’ve done … Continue reading

abc

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 … Continue reading

Monitoring Productivity Experiment

For over a year now, i've been collecting how much time i spend in computer and how much of it is actually used in creative/productive activities. By productive activity i mean that the time spent in text editor(emacs), terminal, excel or a database client is likely to be more … Continue reading

Coincidence in lotteries

Last weekend, my friend and coauthor Jean-Michel Marin was interviewed (as Jean-Claude Marin, sic!) by a national radio about the probability of the replication of a draw on the Israeli Lottery. Twice the same series of numbers appeared within a month. This lotery operates on a principle of 6/37 + … Continue reading

Happy World Statistics Day!

The United Nations has declared today “World Statistics Day”. I’ve no idea what that means, or why we need a WSD. Perhaps it is because the date is 20.10.2010 (except in North America where it is 10.20.2010). But then, what happens from 2013 to 2099? And do we just forget the … Continue reading

EM and Regression Mixture Modeling

Last night, Drew Conway showed me a fascinating graph that he made from the R package data we’ve recently collected from CRAN. That graph will be posted and described in the near future, because it has some really interesting implications for the structure of the R package world. But for the … Continue reading