R-bloggers

This is a post about the famous double descent phenomenon in machine learning. I aim to constrct the simplest possible example of double descent and explain exactly how it arises and why it doesn’t contradict the bias-variance tradeoff. I was inspired...

Following a suggestion by Christian Hennig at JSM 2024, I started working with my PhD student Dana Naderi on a detailed assessment of the method we proposed in 2009 with Darren Wraith for evidence approximation. (The method was briefly mentioned in a Physical Review paper and also briefly illustrated in our 2010 San ...

Creating maps with R is usually straightforward, but representations that cross the International Date Line or that use polar projections can be tricky.

The European Bioconductor conference 2025 (EuroBioC2025) took place between September 17 and 19, 2025, and was hosted at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) in Barcelona by the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (MELIS-UPF)and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal). The Catalan capital boasts a rich culture, ...

      One of my former insurance colleagues once said, "When a company makes a change, it's probably not going to benefit you."       Assuming the above photo is legitimate, and of course no...

The following diagram illustrates the 5-state, absorbing Markov chain framework used to model the progression of patients through various health states as they undergo treatment for asthma. The states are defined as follows: STW= successfully tr...

TL;DR: {rixpress} lets you build multi-language data pipelines (R, Python, Julia) where each step runs in its own reproducible environment. Uses Nix under the hood. Now on CRAN, and there’s even a Python port on PyPI! {rixpress} is now on ...

I have been working on a presentation regarding college readiness and the use of SAT/ACT for college admissions as part of the Diagnostic Assessment and Achievement of College Skills. I wanted to see how the use of these high-stakes assessments h...

Compositional data, where observations represent proportions that sum to a constant, are ubiquitous in ecology, yet many analysts fall back on problematic approaches like separate binomial models, beta regression on ratios, or worse, standard linear regression on raw proportions. These methods ignore the fundamental constraint that proportions must sum to ...

So this is a blog post about making and finding an error in modelling strategy, in an apparently simple situation. I saw this post (toot?) on Mastodon from Daniel Lakens mentioning in passing that “On the other hand, the homicide rate across the world...

Python 3.14 was released on 7th October 2025. Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes and some trends in Python development and data-science over the past year. We will highlight the following: the colourful Python command-line interface; project-management tool uv; free-threading; and a brief summary of other developments. The Python 3.14 ...