Karl Broman writes: Barry Rowlingson gave an interesting talk at UseR 2011, “Why R-help must die!” He suggested the Q-and-A type sites Stack Overflow (on programming) and Cross Validated (on statistics), both part of Stack Exchange. I haven’t used R-help recently but I do occasionally send people there. Just to ... [Read more...]

In the last Utah R Users group meeting I gave a presentation on data manipulations on R, and today I found through the plyr mailing list two commands that I was previously unaware of that should definitely be made mention of, arrage and mutate. [Read more...]

Our discussion on data visualization continues. One one side are three statisticians–Antony Unwin, Kaiser Fung, and myself. We have been writing about the different goals served by information visualization and statistical graphics. On the other side are graphics experts (sorry for the imprecision, I don’t know exactly what ... [Read more...]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/npptor/files/npptor%20installer/NppToR-2.6.0.beta2.exe/download I’ve released beta 2 of NppToR 2.6.0.  Please take a look and report any problems.  This improves the installer and the uninstaller as well as a few bugs that popped up from the transition to UNICODE. [Read more...]

[Read more...]

NppToR 2.6 is coming with improved flexibility and speed. Testers needed before setting as default. [Read more...]

Just as scientists should never really have to think much about statistics, I feel that, in an ideal world, statisticians would never have to worry about computing. In the real world, though, we have to spend a lot of time building our own tools.It would be great if we ... [Read more...]

In the next few days we’ll be changing the format of the blog and moving it to a new server. If you have difficulty posting comments, just wait and post them in a few days when all should be working well. (But if you can post a comment, go ... [Read more...]

Kent Osband writes: [Read more...]

Dave Backus points me to this review by anthropologist Mike McGovern of two books by economist Paul Collier on the politics of economic development in Africa. My first reaction was that this was interesting but non-statistical so I’d have to either post it on the sister blog or wait ... [Read more...]

Maximum likelihood gives the beat fit to the training data but in general overfits, yielding overly-noisy parameter estimates that don't perform so well when predicting new data. A popular solution to this overfitting problem takes advantage of the iterative nature of most maximum likelihood algorithms by stopping early. In general, ... [Read more...]

Seth writes: Here’s my candidate for bad graphic of the year: I [Seth] studied it and learned nothing. I have no idea how they assigned colors to locations. I already knew that there were more within-city calls than calls to individual distant locations — for example that there are more ... [Read more...]

I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and ... [Read more...]

As a statistician, I was trained to think of randomized experimentation as representing the gold standard of knowledge in the social sciences, and, despite having seen occasional arguments to the contrary, I still hold that view, expressed pithily by Box, Hunter, and Hunter (1978) that “To find out what happens when ... [Read more...]

A couple years ago Rod Little was invited to write an article for the diamond jubilee of the Calcutta Statistical Association Bulletin. His article was published with discussions from Danny Pfefferman, J. N. K. Rao, Don Rubin, and myself. Here it all is.I'll paste my discussion below, but it's ... [Read more...]

I received an email from the Royal Statistical Society asking if I wanted to submit a 400-word discussion to the article, Vignettes and health systems responsiveness in cross-country comparative analyses by Nigel Rice, Silvana Robone and Peter C. Smith. My first thought was No, I can’t do it, I ... [Read more...]

When predicting 0/1 data we can use logit (or probit or robit or some other robust model such as invlogit (0.01 + 0.98*X*beta)). Logit is simple enough and we can use bayesglm to regularize and avoid the problem of separation. What if there are more than 2 categories? If they’re ordered (1, 2, 3, etc), [...] [Read more...]

I read this post today by John Quick. I was a little taken back when he used a pairwise t-test for post hoc analysis. In a contradiction the t-test did not show differences in the treatment means when the ANOVA model did. This is because the pairwise.t.test does ... [Read more...]

I’m organizing a new R Users Group for the University of Utah and Research Park sponsored by the Study Design and Biostatistics Center. We welcome all to come. The first meeting will be dedicated to finding out what users needs and abilities are. We also welcome all skill levels. ... [Read more...]

NppToR 2.5.0 supports R-2.12.0, improves saved settings and install, also retires the syntax generator. [Read more...]