Recently, Yu-Sung Su and Masanao Yajima, the developers of the R2jags package, have released a new version (the current one is 0.03-11). As far as I understand it, one of the main changes is that since the update, R2jags no longer depend... [Read more...]

Today I've given the talk on the model for structural zeros and the related R package BCEs0 for the third time in three weeks (this time it was at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).Le Tour is going quite well, I think $-$ in... [Read more...]

Earlier today, Gareth has showed me a recent, interesting paper by Michael Sweeting (and colleagues). In the paper, Micheal et al describe their work on a R package to extend on the framework of the Continual Reassessment Method (the ori... [Read more...]

This Thursday I'll give a talk at the GSK Statistics Forum. Erika (with whom I shared a train journey to the 2012 BayesPharma and a group walk in Oxfordshire a few years back) now works at GSK and invited me. I will talk about the model for c... [Read more...]

Earlier today, I found some interesting data on Italian MPs voting records in the current parliament (which was opened last April). The data are available for both Houses (the Italian system has a lower house, called Camera $-$ effectively the same as the House of Commons in the UK $-$ ... [Read more...]

In a recent post, I had hinted at big news for BCEA $-$ I thought it was pretty much a done deal, but because it wasn't yet set in stone, I didn't want to jinx it...But now I've sorted all the details with Springer, who have asked me to ... [Read more...]

I know that updating a package too often is not quite good practice, so, given we've released BCEA 1.3-1 just about a month ago, this is way too soon to move forward. But between the last release and now, I've been doing some reading and have made some... [Read more...]

BCEs0 is the new R package I've written $-$ well, nearly finished to, anyway; it should be ready in version 1.0 in the next few days. The acronym stands for Bayesian models for Cost-Effectiveness with structural 0s, and it basically implements the mode... [Read more...]

Recently, I've been working on a paper, which I think is coming along nicely. The basic problem is like this: in a health economic evaluation, sometimes data are collected on a sample of individuals. Say, for example, that $n_0$ subjects are given a st... [Read more...]

Thank goodness, I think that even if this statistician business turns out badly, I can still make a living with rafting (if only by begging for money, in exchange for looking ridiculous in the swim suit)... As part as my brother's stag do, we went... [Read more...]

After months of work (although to be fair, we haven't worked 100% full time on this), Andrea and I are nearly ready to publish the next release of BCEA. Andrea has done a brilliant job and is responsible for most of the good new features (NB: see ... [Read more...]

Inspired by this post on R-bloggers, I decided to check how BCEA was doing. Unfortunately, it does not feature in the top 100 most downloaded R packages. However, I think it's doing well $-$ considering the book (which is the main medium of advertising of the package) has been out for ... [Read more...]

Marta and I are doing some re-analysis of our Eurovision contest (some context here and here). We have slightly modified our original model (mostly, I have navigated the mess in Marta's notation $-$ it's OK: I'm not at risk of her mighty wrath, as I've... [Read more...]

Yesterday Gareth pointed me to this article on the BBC website. The underlying story has to do with Meredith Kercher's murder and the subsequent trial involving mainly her flat-mate Amanda Knox, in Perugia (Italy). As often in these grue... [Read more...]

Karl Saliba writes with some queries about our football paper, which I have already discussed on the blog here. He says:Thanks to the code in the appendix I could easily replicate (by using WinBUGS) a similar analysis on any football league of my ... [Read more...]

We finally got around to prepare everything we needed to advertise the position which will be available in the MRC grant we've been awarded last year.The project will run for 30 months and we're looking for a post-doctoral candidate to work on the Rese... [Read more...]

Mart Janssen writes me that he's tried to run the examples for BCEA and pointed out a problem $-$ it all boiled down to a missing script, really, but thanks Mart (if you're reading this)!I've now fixed the problem by updating the file Ut... [Read more...]

You'd think that the last week before the holidays would be very quiet and not much would be going on. Well, if you did, you'd be wrong, I guess, as the last few days have been quite busy (for many reasons). Anyway, I managed to track down some be... [Read more...]

Effectively, the Italian election campaign is already in full swing, so I tried to start collecting some data to see what we are about to face. If I have time and manage to get some good data, I'll try to replicate the analysis I made for the US election (surely ... [Read more...]

The other day I was talking to a friend at work, who was rather annoyed that one of his papers had been rejected by a journal, given the negative comments of the reviewers. This is, of course, part of the game, so you don't really get annoyed just because a ... [Read more...]