Everybody loves a good map. Even if you don’t have any reason to make one, your boss will love it when you do, so check this out and get yourself a pay rise (possibly). First, this set of diagrams via … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Yesterday I was reading Kontopantelis & Reeves’s 2010 paper “Performance of statistical methods for meta-analysis when true study effects are non-normally distributed: A simulation study“, which compares fixed-effects and a variety of random effects models under the (entirely realistic) situation … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Round at the RSS Statistical Computing committee, we were having a chuckle at the prospect of a meeting about Stats In Bed. By which I mean analysis on mobile devices, phones and tablets (henceforth phablets), not some sort of raunchy … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Recently I encountered an R package called pingr, made by Rasmus Bååth (the same guy who did MCMC in a web page, my visualization of 2013). You install it, you type ping(), and it goes ping. Nice. In fact there … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Here’s some fun I had today. If you are looking at some published stats and they tell you a percentage but not the numerator & denominator, you can still work them out. That’s to say, you can get your computer … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I teach some introductory stats classes with SPSS, and one of the frustrations for me is that you have to pay an extra wad of cash to do any bootstrapping. It’s not exactly the complete analysis solution that you might … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Two items of post from utility companies that recently dropped through our door included little graphics. There was a degree of innovation in them both. The first, from British Gas, is technically OK but probably bad on perceptual grounds: I got … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I’ve been looking into a particular Bayesian meta-analysis model of late. Can’t tell you any more right now of course, but I wanted to check that it was throwing up sensible results and then compare it to classical MA methods. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

My short paper on this came out on Friday in the British Medical Journal. The aim is to help both authors and readers of research make sense of this rather confusing but unavoidable statistic, the odds ratio (OR). The fundamental … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Despite winter rain, I was delighted to head uptown last week to Skills Matter on the old Goswell Road for the first ever London Julia meetup. The first thing I learnt was that Julia’s friends are called Julians. If you … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This is not a partisan post that extols the virtues of one software package over another. I love Stata and R and use them both all the time. They each have strengths and weaknesses and if I could only take … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Recently, I was looking at some published research, and I became concerned that it looked strange. Firstly, it had results wildly different to other similar studies, and more exciting / publishable ones. So, I was looking through the original paper … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Jim Silverton wrote to the Allstat mailing list recently: “Hi, Anyone up for a challenge? Suppose we have [4] random variables that are random points on the surface of a sphere. What is the probability that the tetrahedron made by joining these … Continue reading → [Read more...]

On the afternoon of 14 November, the RSS is hosting a joint meeting with the International Biometric Society at Errol Street. The topic is inter-operability, as in software packages talking to each other to make your life easier. This is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Some useful tips recently featured on r-bloggers and originally posted at Mollie’s Research Blog are worth reading. I say moderately large because I don’t really believe there is such a thing as big data (and it looks like Mollie doesn’t … Continue reading → [Read more...]

It looks like the next LondonR meeting on 10 September 2013 will involve a series of 5 minute lightning talks rather than a few half hour slots. I have proposed “Audiblization / sonification of data: what are people doing and … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I have been amazed for a while that there is no major stats software offering pictograms. You know the sort of classic infographic I mean: Well, I have been working on an R function to help with this. It’s at … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I have been working on a simple R function to take latitude and longitude of points of interest, and text for pop-up labels, and produce an interactive online map. Interactive graphics are incredibly useful in getting people interested in your … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Whoa! Now this is cool. It turns out there is a database at freegeoip.net which you can query for the location of a particular IP address. And as it has a neat little API for batches of IPs, you can … Continue reading → [Read more...]

On receiving an advent calendar from one of our course directors, I suggested we could track each other’s chocolate consumption in a survival analysis and establish who was eating significantly more chocs. Strangely, everybody refused to take part, so I … Continue reading → [Read more...]