# Monthly Archives: January 2011

## Arrogance sampling

January 7, 2011
By
$Arrogance sampling$

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

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## 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, i.e. a heatmap in which the numbers themselves are also shown. Perhaps not quite as intuitive but less misleading. It uses the

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## Heatmap tables

January 7, 2011
By

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...

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## 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...

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## 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 ...

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## 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

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## formatR update (0.1-6)

January 6, 2011
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A new version of the formatR package is available on CRAN now (binary packages are still on the way). There are three major updates: the inline comments will also be preserved in most cases (in earlier versions, only single lines of comments are preserved) tidy.source() gained a new argument 'text' to accept a character vector

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## web content anlayzer

January 6, 2011
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Just developed a small crawler to check my online content at binfalse.de in terms of W3C validity and the availability of external links. Here is the code and some statistics...

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## Gapminder

January 6, 2011
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As many people are aware Hans Rosling is an enthusiastic swedish academic with a passion for statistics who recently presented the program The Joy of Stats. One of the great things about Hans Rosling is his presentations and the interactive graphics that he uses to make his points. Fast Tube by Casper The gapminder software

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## New R User Group in Kansas City

January 6, 2011
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There's a new R User Group based in Kansas City, Kansas. Abraham Mathew just launched the group's website, and is looking for R users in the area to kick things off: This group was started to bring together R users in the Kansas City area to exchange knowledge and provide guidance to new R users. We hope to have...

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