# Monthly Archives: January 2011

January 8, 2011
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Just before Xmas, Conrad Sanderson released version 1.1.0 of Armadillo, his templated C++ library for linear algebra. Which I only noticed this week, so here comes version 0.2.11 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R. The only other ...

## The Automatic Millionaire & Amortization

January 8, 2011
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Dan Byrne of Vanderbilt University gave me a book back in October titled The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. The book is an easy read and full of sound advice that I intend to take. Bach espouses a plan for retirement built on the principles of “paying yourself first” (i.e. before taxation, 401(k), 403(b)), making

## An example of linear discriminant analysis

January 8, 2011
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The following example was shown in an advanced statistics seminar held in tel aviv. The material for the presentation comes from C.M Bishop’s book : Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Springer(2006). One way of separating 2 categories using linear sub spaces of the input space (e.g. planes for 3D inputs, lines for 2D inputs, [&hellip

## Building a fact-based world view

January 7, 2011
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Gapminder is an independent foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Its mission is “to debunk devastating myths about the world by offering free access to a fact-based world view“. They provide free online tools, data (more than 400 datasets freely available!) and videos “to better understand the changing world“. The initial development of Gapminder was the

## Arrogance sampling

January 7, 2011
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$Arrogance sampling$

A new posting on arXiv by Benedict Escoto on a simulation method for approximating normalising constants (i.e. evidence) with an eye-catching name! Here is the abstract This paper describes a method for estimating the marginal likelihood or Bayes factors of Bayesian models using non-parametric importance sampling (“arrogance sampling”). This method can also be used to

## Heatmap tables

January 7, 2011
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I blogged earlier (http://socialdatablog.com/what-is-wrong-with-this-graph) about the well-known risks of implying a continuous data scale in a graph where there isn't one. I just produced this alternative in the form of a heatmap table...

## survival curves for Leonid

January 7, 2011
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Leonid asked me to do a quick survival analysis of two different types of mouse (m430 and m210) with surgically implanted tumours (or something like that). The data was in the wrong format but after transforming it looked like this: In my opini...

## Boris Bikes/Barclays Cycle Hire Average Journey Times

January 6, 2011
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The visualisation above shows the average relative duration of Boris Bikers’ weekday journeys over a 4 month period at hourly intervals. For each time step the average journey time (in seconds) from each docking station has been calculated.This information is interesting because it shows the preference for short journeys around the City of London, whilst ...

## a survey on ABC

January 6, 2011
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With Jean-Michel Marin, Pierre Pudlo and Robin Ryder, we just completed a survey on the ABC methodology. It is now both arXived and submitted to Statistics and Computing. Rather interestingly, our first draft was written in Jean-Michel’s office in Montpelier by collating the ‘Og posts surveying new ABC papers! (Interestingly because this means that my