Except for maybe the t test, a contender for the title “most used and abused statistical test” is Pearson’s correlation test. Whenever someone wants to check if two variables relate somehow it is a safe bet (at least in psychology) that the first thing to be tested is the ... [Read more...]

In part one and part two of Modeling Match Results in La Liga Using a Hierarchical Bayesian Poisson Model I developed a model for the number of goals in football matches from five seasons of La Liga, the premier Spanish football league. I’m now reasonably happy with the model ... [Read more...]

In the last blog post I showed my initial attempt at modeling football results in La Liga using a Bayesian Poission model, but there was one glaring problem with the model; it did not consider the advantage of being the home team. In this post I will show how to ... [Read more...]

This is a slightly modified version of my submission to the UseR 2013 Data Analysis Contest which I had the fortune of winning :) The purpose of the contest was to do something interesting with a dataset consisting of the match results from the last five seasons of La Liga, the premium ... [Read more...]

I had a great time at useR 2013 in Albacete, Spain. The food was great, the people were fun and the weather was hot. A pleasant surprise was that I won the useR data analysis contest with my submission “Modeling Match Results in La Liga Using a Hierarchical Bayesian Poisson Model.” ... [Read more...]

There are different ways of specifying and running Bayesian models from within R. Here I will compare three different methods, two that relies on an external program and one that only relies on R. I won’t go into much detail about the differences in syntax, the idea is more ... [Read more...]

Anscombe’s quartet is a collection of four datasets that look radically different yet result in the same regression line when using ordinary least square regression. The graph below shows Anscombe’s quartet with imposed regression lines (taken from the Wikipedia article). While least square regression is a good choice ... [Read more...]