A couple of days ago, we had a quick chat on Karl Broman‘s blog, about snakes and ladders (see http://kbroman.wordpress.com/…) with Karl and Corey (see http://bayesianbiologist.com/….), and the use of Markov Chain. I do believe that this application is truly awesome: the example is understandable by anyone, and computations (almost any kind, from what we’ve tried) are easy to perform....
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What happened to six million voters?
The recent elections in Pakistan on May 11 were a great success by all means. In spite of the threats for violence by Al-Qaeda and its local franchises in Pakistan against those who would vote, millions of Pakistanis indeed stepped out to vote for an elected government. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) claimed a voter turnout of 60%....
More on Chutes & Ladders
Matt Maenner asked about the sawtooth pattern in the figure in my last post on Chutes & Ladders. Damn you, Matt! I thought I was done with this. Don’t feed my obsession. My response was that if the game ends early, it’s even more likely that it’ll be the kid who went first who won. 
What is probabilistic truth?
I am currently working on a validation metric for binary prediction models. That is, models which make predictions about outcomes that can take on either of two possible states (eg Dead/not dead, heads/tails, cat in picture/no cat in picture, etc.) The most commonly used metric for this class of models is AUC, which assesses the 
Chutes & ladders: How long is this going to take?
I was playing Chutes & Ladders with my four-year-old daughter yesterday, and I thought, “How long is this going to take?” I saw an interesting mathematical analysis of the game a few years ago, but it seems to be offline, though you can read it via the wayback machine. But that didn’t answer my specific 
Which Torontonians Want a Casino? Survey Analysis Part 2
In my last post I said that I would try to investigate the question of who actually does want a casino, and whether place of residence is a factor in where they want the casino to be built. So, here … Continue reading →
Revolution Newsletter: May 2013
The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full May edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Gaming Analytics FTW! Join us on 13Jun13 at 10:00 AM PDT for our webinar...
Automated Archival and Visual Analysis of Tweets Mentioning #bog13, Bioinformatics, #rstats, and Others
Automatically Archiving Twitter ResultsEver since Twitter gamed its own API and killed off great services like IFTTT triggers, I've been looking for a way to automatically archive tweets containing certain search terms of interest to me. Twitter's buil...
Claims Inflation – a known unknown
Over the last year I worked with two colleagues of mine on the subject of inflation and claims inflation in particular. I didn't expect it to be such a challenging topic, but we ended up with more questions than answers. The key question and biggest ch...
Integration take two – Shiny application
My last post discussed a technique for integrating functions in R using a Monte Carlo or randomization approach. The mc.int function (available here) estimated the area underneath a curve by multiplying the proportion of random points below the curve by the total area covered by points within the interval: The estimated integration (bottom plot) is 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
