Welcome to the re-designed, re-hosted and re-platformed Simply Statistics blog. We have moved the blog over to the WordPress platform to give us some newer features that were lacking over at tumblr. So far the transition has gone okay but … Continue reading → [Read more...]

An interview with Brad Efron about scientific writing. I haven’t watched the whole interview, but I do know that Efron is one of my favorite writers among statisticians. Slidify, another approach for making HTML5 slides directly from R.  I love … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Congratulations to Bradley Saul, the winner of the Simply Statistics Logo contest! We had some great entries which made it difficult to choose between them. You can see the new logo to the right of our home page or the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Last night this article by Chris Drummond of the Canadian National Research Council (Conseil national de recherches Canada) popped up in my Google Scholar alert. The title of the article, “Reproducible Research: a Dissenting Opinion” would seem to indicate that he disagrees … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Tom Louis Tom Louis is a professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins and will be joining the Census Bureau through an interagency personnel agreement as the new associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist. Tom has an impressive history of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The night of the presidential elections I wrote a post celebrating the victory of data over punditry. I was motivated by the personal attacks made against Nate Silver by pundits that do not understand Statistics. The post generated a little … Continue reading → [Read more...]

My favorite statistician did it again! Just like in 2008, he predicted the presidential election results almost perfectly. For those that don’t know, Nate Silver is the statistician that runs the fivethirtyeight blog. He combines data from hundreds of polls, uses … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When I talk about collaborative work, I don’t mean spending a day or two helping compute some p-values and end up as middle author in a subject-matter paper. I mean spending months working on a project, from start to finish, with experts … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Brian Caffo headlines the WaPo article about massive online open courses. He is the driving force behind our department’s involvement in offering these massive courses. I think this sums it up: `“I can’t use another word than unbelievable,” Caffo said. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I am working on a project that requires the generation of Bernoulli outcomes. Typically, I would go about this using the built in sample() function like so: This works great and is fast, even for large n. Problem is, I want to generate each sample with its own unique probability. ... [Read more...]

Bayesian analysis has been growing in popularity among ecologists recently, largely due to accessible books such as Models for Ecological Data: An Introduction, Introduction to WinBUGS for Ecologists, and Bayesian Methods for Ecology. Most ecologists with limited programming background have … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This is a quick follow-up to my previous post about Color Palettes in RGB Space. Achim Zeileis had commented that, perhaps, it would be more informative to evaluate the color palettes in HCL (polar LUV) space, as that spectrum more accurately describes how humans perceive color. Perhaps more clear trends ... [Read more...]

If you’ve ever written code that generates a whole whack of files, you may have came across the following problem when processing them. Using a naming convention wherein files are numbered will  gum up any ordering which is based on string sorting (ls, for example). What you end up ... [Read more...]

The SPEC benchmarks came out a year after the first release of gcc (in fact gcc was and still is one of the programs included in the benchmark). Compiling the SPEC programs using the gcc option -O2 (sometimes -O3) has always been the way to measure gcc performance, but after 25 ... [Read more...]

The purpose of software engineering research is to figure out how software development works so that the software industry can improve its quality/timeliness (i.e., lower costs and improved customer satisfaction). Research is hampered by the fact that companies are not usually willing to make public good quality data ... [Read more...]

Context: I work with data from non-profit organizations, and so a big concern in many of my analyses is if and how much people are donating from one year to the next.  One of the  things I normally like to do … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I wrote before about heatmap tables as a better way of producing frequency or other tables, with a solution which works nicely in latex. It is possible to do them much more easily in ggplot2, like this library(Hmisc) library(ggplot2) library(reshape) data(HairEyeColor) P=t(HairEyeColor[,,2]) Pm=melt(... [Read more...]

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I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last month or so doing projects at work not statistics related, hence the lack of posts!  In the interim, I had to do some serious research on handling datasets bigger than … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Being professional involved with analyzing source code I get to work with a much larger number of programming languages than most people. There is a huge difference between knowing the intricate details of the semantics of a language and being able to fluently program in a language like a native ... [Read more...]