Probability and statistics blog

As should be clear from the timestamps on previous posts, this blog is now mostly in hibernation mode. Meanwhile, I have been writing and recording podcast episodes, sometimes about topics related to what you used to find on this blog. If you want to continue to follow my thoughts on topics like how to evaluate the […]

In addition to updating this blog once every few years, I have a more regular podcast, The Filter. While not about just statistics, readers of this blog might find the following episodes, among others, interesting: Cargo Cults (and black box problems) Simulation Hypothesis AR Dystopia Andrew Gelman Interview Russ Roberts Interview To subscribe to the […]

We have a crisis of epistemology. A tsunami of bad tools, bad ideas, biased actors, and unresolved problems. Among our many issues, we have: Predictions treated as facts, and inherently fuzzy historical data presented without error bars. Small scale studies on college students and professional guinea pigs extrapolated out to whole populations. Overused assumptions of […]

Recently mathematician Terence Tao posted some ruminations on how to visualize the different values a random variable could take. He created some basic animated loops that cycled through some samples from the distribution, and proposed a way to represent conditionality as well. I liked the idea so much I’ve added it to my probability distributions […]

Recently mathematician Terence Tao posted some ruminations on how to visualize the different values a random variable could take. He created some basic animated loops that cycled through some samples from the distribution, and proposed a way to represent conditionality as well. I liked the idea so much I’ve added it to my probability distributions […]

I happened to be travelling through Brussels, so I stopped by Ghent, the world hotspot for research into imprecise probabilities, and setup an interview with Gert de Cooman. Gert has been working in imprecise probabilities for more than twenty years, is a founding member and former President of SIPTA, the Society for Imprecise Probability: Theories […]

I happened to be travelling through Brussels, so I stopped by Ghent, the world hotspot for research into imprecise probabilities, and setup an interview with Gert de Cooman. Gert has been working in imprecise probabilities for more than twenty years, is a founding member and former President of SIPTA, the Society for Imprecise Probability: Theories […]

For a JavaScript-based project I’m working on, I need to be able to sample from a variety of probability distributions. There are ways to call R from JavaScript, but they depend on the server running R. I can’t depend on that. I need a pure JS solution. I found a handful of JS libraries that […]

For a JavaScript-based project I’m working on, I need to be able to sample from a variety of probability distributions. There are ways to call R from JavaScript, but they depend on the server running R. I can’t depend on that. I need a pure JS solution. I found a handful of JS libraries that […]

I’m looking to put together a small crew to take on a large arbitrage project. The (rough) model for this would be “Hong Kong Syndicate” which took on the horse betting market. To be involved you have to be willing to make a large commitment in terms of time or money (I plan to contribute both). […]

I’m looking to put together a small crew to take on a large arbitrage project. The (rough) model for this would be “Hong Kong Syndicate” which took on the horse betting market. To be involved you have to be willing to make a large commitment in terms of time or money (I plan to contribute both). […]

If you are a first-timer here at StatisticsBlog.com, or if you’re looking for a list of Greatest Hits, check out the shiny new Start Here page.

“So let’s start with the fact that the study had only 100 people, which isn’t nearly enough to be able to make any determinations like this. That’s very small power. Secondly, it was already split into two groups, and the two groups by the way have absolutely zero scientific basis. There is no theory that […]

“So let’s start with the fact that the study had only 100 people, which isn’t nearly enough to be able to make any determinations like this. That’s very small power. Secondly, it was already split into two groups, and the two groups by the way have absolutely zero scientific basis. There is no theory that […]

Pinned, entropy augmented, digitally normal distribution, of no particular work-related use and thus perfectly suitable for today. Code in R: iters = 1000 sd = 2 precision = 20 results = rep(0,iters) for(i in 1:iters) { x = floor(rnorm(20,5,sd) %% 10) results[i] = paste(c('.',x),sep="",collapse="") } results = as.numeric(results) plot(density(results,bw=.01),col="blue",lwd=3,bty="n")

Pinned, entropy augmented, digitally normal distribution, of no particular work-related use and thus perfectly suitable for today. Code in R: iters = 1000 sd = 2 precision = 20 results = rep(0,iters) for(i in 1:iters) { x = floor(rnorm(20,5,sd) %% 10) results[i] = paste(c('.',x),sep="",collapse="") } results = as.numeric(results) plot(density(results,bw=.01),col="blue",lwd=3,bty="n")

If you are on the job market, Tal Galili from R bloggers has compiled 3 new R jobs for seekers like you. Text mining is currently a live issue in data analysis. Enoromus text data resourses on the Internet made it an important component of Big Data world. If text mining is something that you […]

Right now I’m working on a project that involves new ways to view units of content and the relationships between them. I’ve posted the comic I worked on, it has a number of stats references throughout. This is early alpha stages for the software, you may run into issues. To see the relationships, go to […]

I’ve produced a pilot episode of a “Probability Podcast”. Please have a listen and let me know if you’d be interested in hearing more episodes. Thanks! The different approaches of Fermat and Pascal Pascal’s solution, which may have come first (we don’t have all of the letters between Pascal and Fermat, and the order of […]

This week, we recommend two books on machine learning to our readers: Machine Learning with R by Brett Lantz (reviewed by Alvaro “Blag” Tejada Galindo), and An Introduction to Statistical Learning  with Applications in R by Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani (a pdf version of this book is available on Gareth […]