I have written a few posts discussing descriptive analyses of evaluation of National Standards for New Zealand primary schools.The data for roughly half of the schools was made available by the media, but the full version of the dataset is … Continue reading →
Eric and I have been exchanging emails about potential analyses for the school data and he published a first draft model in Offsetting Behaviour. I have kept on doing mostly data exploration while we get a definitive full dataset, and … Continue reading →
I like the idea of having data on school performance, not to directly rank schools—hard, to say the least, at this stage—but because we can start having a look at the factors influencing test results. I imagine the opportunity in … Continue reading →
Oddities tend to jump out when one uses software in a daily basis. The situation is even clearer when using software for teaching: many more people looking at it with fresh eyes. Let’s say that we are fitting a simple … Continue reading →
This is one of those times of the year: struggling to keep the head above the water, roughly one month before the last lecture of the semester. On top trying to squeeze trips, meetings and presentations in between while dealing … Continue reading →
Suicide is a tragic and complex problem. This week New Zealand’s Chief Coroner released its annual statistics on suicide, which come with several tables and figures. One of those figures refers to monthly suicides in the Christchurch region (where I … Continue reading →
Today Scott Chamberlain tweeted asking for a better/faster solution to building an m x n matrix with randomly assigned 0/1. He already had a working version: Now, I’m the first to acknowledge that I’ve never got the ‘apply’ family of … Continue reading →
Reached mid-semester point, with quite a few new lectures to prepare. Nothing extremely complicated but, as always, the tricky part is finding a way to make it meaningful and memorable. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, I sound … Continue reading →
INLA is not the Norwegian answer to ABBA; that would probably be a-ha. INLA is the answer to ‘Why do I have enough time to cook a three-course meal while running MCMC analyses?”. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA) is based … Continue reading →
When running stats labs I like to allocate a slightly different subset of data to each student, which acts as an incentive for people to do their own work (rather than copying the same results from a fellow student). We … Continue reading →
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
