In this, Chomsky is in complete agreement with O’Reilly. (I recognize that the previous sentence would have an extremely low probability in a probabilistic model trained on a newspaper or TV corpus.)1 Anyone who considers themself an intellectual should be required to read this new essay by Peter Norvig. It’s the best summary I’ve ever
Blog Archives
Problems with ggplot2 0.8.9 and R 2.13.0 on Mac OS X via plyr 1.5
This morning I tried to completely update my R installation. I first dumped a list of all the packages I have on my system using the installed.packages() function. Then I installed R 2.13.0 using the OS X disk image. And finally I reinstalled all of my packages from scratch. Unfortunately, I ran into some serious
A Request for Foursquare Data
I’m trying to collect data sets that showcase how the classical statistical distributions appear in modern contexts. I’ve already got some data that shows how the gamma distribution appears in video game scores, and now I’m hoping to find an example where the exponential distribution
A 3D Version of R’s curve() Function
I like exploring the behavior of functions of a single variable using the curve() function in R. One thing that seems to be missing from R’s base functions is a tool for exploring functions of two variables. I asked for examples of such a function on Twitter today and didn’t get any answers, so I
Canabalt Revisited: Gamma Distributions, Multinomial Distributions and More JAGS Goodness
Introduction Neil Kodner recently got me interested again in analyzing Canabalt scores statistically by writing a great post in which he compared the average scores across iOS devices. Thankfully, Neil’s made his code and data freely available, so I’ve been revising my original analyses using his new data whenever I can find a free minute.
Review of R Graphs Cookbook
The kind people at Packt Publishing recently asked me to review one of their newest R books: the R Graphs Cookbook. In general, I think pretty highly of the book: it provides a nice overview of the basic tools for visualizing data in R. If you’re just getting started with creating graphs in R, this
Modern Science and the Bayesian-Frequentist Controversy
The Bayesian-Frequentist debate reflects two different attitudes to the process of doing science, both quite legitimate. Bayesian statistics is well-suited to individual researchers, or a research group, trying to use all the information at its disposal to make the quickest possible progress. In pursuing progress, Bayesians tend to be aggressive and optimistic with their modeling
Inconsistencies in Bayesian Models of Decision-Making
But modeling devices that make sense for an unbiased decisionmaker may not make sense for a biased one. For example, why would individuals have priors and posteriors if they are destined to apply Bayes’ law incorrectly?1 A question I often ask myself. Wolfgang Pesendorfer : Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A Review Essay on Advances
Academic Jargon: Field-Specific Insults
Every academic field seems to develop a set of generic insults based on their intellectual toolkit. Here are two examples I hear often: Probabilists and Statisticians: “I think that’s an interesting case, but it’s in a set with measure zero.” Economists: “X group’s behavior is clearly rent-seeking.” Do any readers have good examples from other
A Draft of ProjectTemplate v0.2-1
I’ve just uploaded a new binary of ProjectTemplate to GitHub. This is a draft version of the next release, v0.2-1, which includes some fairly substantial changes and is backwards incompatible in several ways with previous versions of ProjectTemplate. Foremost of the changes is that most of the logic for load.project() is now built into the
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
