In this post I will provide R code that implement’s the combination of repeated running quantile with the LOESS smoother to create a type of “quantile LOESS” (e.g: “Local Quantile Regression”). This method is useful when the need arise to fit robust and resistant (Need to be verified) ... [Read more...]

Adam Bonica, a grad student in political science at NYU, recently published a ranking of the political slant of various professions, based on the amount and recipient (Republican or Democratic) of political donations by lawyers, lobbyists, physicians and many other occupations. This paper (PDF) gives the complete analysis, but the ... [Read more...]

In ScienceNews this month, there's controversial article exposing the fact that results claimed to be "statistically significant" in scientific articles aren't always what they're cracked up to be. The article -- titled "Odds Are, It's Wrong" is interesting, but I take a bit of an issue with the sub-headline, "Science ... [Read more...]

I’ve been vaguely aware of BioMart for a few years. Inexplicably, I’ve only recently started to use it. It’s one of the most useful applications I’ve ever used. The concept is simple. You have a set of identifiers that describe a biological object, such as a ... [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...]

Inspired from a mail that came along the previous random generation post the following question rised : How to draw random variates from the Von Mises distribution? First of all let’s check the pdf of the probability rule, it is , for . Ok, I admit that Bessels functions can be a ... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit How The Chart Was Made Whenever a Twitter user posts a tweet, an object is created and entered into t... [Read more...]

There was a post here about obtaining non-standard p-values for testing the correlation coefficient. The R-library SuppDists deals with this problem efficiently. library(SuppDists) plot(function(x)dPearson(x,N=23,rho=0.7),-1,1,ylim=c(0,10),ylab="density") plot(function(x)dPearson(x,N=23,rho=0),-1,1,add=TRUE,col="steelblue") plot(function(... [Read more...]

Readers returning to our blog will know that Win-Vector LLC is fairly “pro-R.” You can take that to mean “in favor or R” or “professionally using R” (both statements are true). Some days we really don’t feel that way. Consider the following snippet of R code where we create ... [Read more...]

Here are the slides for the Savage-Dickey paradox paper that I gave in San Antonio this morning: (Any suspected coincidence of the first part with earlier talks is for real!) I have tried to spell out as clearly as possible in the second part the issues of version choices that ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, I gave my short (3 hours) introduction to computational Bayesian statistics to a group of 25-30 highly motivated students. I managed to cover “only” the first three chapters, as I included some material on Bayes factor approximation and only barely reached Metropolis-Hastings. Here are the slides, modified from the original ... [Read more...]

The vanilla Rao-Blackwellisation paper with Randal Douc that had been resubmitted to the Annals of Statistics is now back for a revision, with quite encouraging comments: The paper has been reviewed by two referees both of whom comment on the clear exposition and the novelty of the results. Both referees ... [Read more...]

One of the most common exersices given to Statistical Computing,Simulation or relevant classes is the generation of random numbers from a gamma distribution. At first this might seem straightforward in terms of the lifesaving relation that exponential and gamma random variables share. So, it’s easy to get a ... [Read more...]

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.1 Over the next ten years, I hope ... [Read more...]

Following my remarks on the t-walk algorithm in the recent A General Purpose Sampling Algorithm for Continuous Distributions, published by Christen and Fox in Bayesian Analysis that acts like a general purpose MCMC algorithm, Darren Wraith tested it on the generic (10 dimension) banana target we used in the cosmology paper. ... [Read more...]

It’s π-day today so we gonna have a little fun today with Buffon’s needle and of course R. A well known approximation to the value of $latex \pi$ is the experiment tha Buffon performed using a needle of length,$latex l$. What I do in the next is ... [Read more...]

Today is the one year anniversary of the NYC R Statistical Meetup. Starting as a small group meeting in a crowded conference room, Josh Reich established the meetup as the premiere gathering of data geeks in the tri-state area. Over the past year we have had 10 meetups, and two more ... [Read more...]

When I read in the abstract of the recent A General Purpose Sampling Algorithm for Continuous Distributions, published by Christen and Fox in Bayesian Analysis that We develop a new general purpose MCMC sampler for arbitrary continuous distributions that requires no tuning. I am slightly bemused. The proposal of the ... [Read more...]

From a recent mailing from Stata (highlighting by me): Funnily enough, there is a Daniel Rubin, a bio-informatics person here at Stanford. [Read more...]

The nls() function has a well documented (and discussed) different behavior compared to the lm()’s. Specifically you can’t just put an indexed column from a data frame as an input or output of the model. __ nls(data[,2] ~ c + expFct(data[,4],beta), data = time.data, + start = start.list) Error ... [Read more...]