One of the misuses of statistical terminology that annoys me most is the use of the word “correlation” to describe any variable that increases as another variable increases. This monotonic trend seems worth looking for, but it plainly is not what m... [Read more...]

Every time that I read a paper that discusses the frequencies of single letters in English, I feel like I should sit down and calculate them for myself from a sample of English text. Today, I finally did. Here are the probabilities and negative log pro... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

For any Princeton graduate students who are interested, here’s the success rate for graduate students applying for school housing. These charts were built using the data from the 2008-2009 Room Draw Statistics pamphlet provided by the Division of Hou... [Read more...]

I was completely tickled last year with the oh so amusing Statz Rappers. It kept me and my nerdy stats friends laughing for days. Rapping. Stats. The Internet. Good times. But little did I know that rapping about statistics was really just hitting its stride on youtube. This is Why ... [Read more...]

Yesterday the topic of academic citation counts came up, so I decided that I should write up some tools for exploring cite counts. The first thing I did was to build a cheap screenscraper in Ruby for pulling citation count information from Google schol... [Read more...]

These interactive graphics are simply beautiful. And they just so happen to be profoundly informative about the structure of modern science as well. Here’s to the hope that we will see more work from Moritz Stefaner soon that shows how our aesthetic ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON THE APPEAL OF R (click to view movie) It is no secret that Decision Science News is crazy about the R language for statistical computing. Find out why R is so great in this New York Times article. Then start to teach yourself R with ... [Read more...]

Because of Andrew Gelman’s strong, repeated recommendations, I’ve been reading “Forecasting Presidential Elections” by Steven J. Rosenstone for the last two days. It’s quite a remarkable book and complex enough that I’m sure I’ll return t... [Read more...]

TIOBE has released the newest ranking for the most popular programming language here. Java remains the top popular programming language. C and C++ follow with Java. I dont' see R in this ranking. Maybe it doesn't belong to this group! Maybe I should ... [Read more...]

This is just a sum-up of what we should do when we try to estimate the group-level variances and correlations but the software failed to do so. As a R and lmer() user, I found this happens often.If this is the case, there are three potential problems... [Read more...]

In a comment on my first post on design flaws in the R language, Longhai remarked that he has encountered problems as a result of R’s default behaviour of dropping a dimension of a matrix when you select only one row/column from that dimension. This was indeed the ... [Read more...]

The R language for statistical computing has become the standard for academic statistical research, for the very good reason that it’s better than the alternatives. It’s far from perfect however. I could come up with a long “wish list” of desired features it lacks, but that’s not ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

useR! CONFERENCE, AUGUST 12-14 2008, DORTMUND GERMANY Impressive statistical computing types like Andrew Gelman, Gary King, and others will be presenting at this year’s useR! conference. Decision Science News might just have to hop over and check it out. The program looks great. Those interested in learning R might be ... [Read more...]

It’s been ages since I visited the R website, so I don’t know how long they’ve had a wiki. It’s built using DokuWiki, one of my personal favourites. This is a great leap forward for R documentation, which is somewhat notorious for being (a) difficult to ... [Read more...]

SIMPLE WAYS TO DETECT AND COMMUNICATE STATISTICAL EFFECTS Decision Science News is fond of heuristics and the Simonian view that for many problems organisms face, optimization is a fiction and satisficing makes us smart. Statistics is an area in which it is easy to see precision that isn’t there ... [Read more...]

Developers of statnet, a collection of packages for R for fitting Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM), issued a major update. First change is that the main package is now called ergm. Secondly, a set of additional packages has been made available. Apart from package network, that provides a class system ... [Read more...]