[Note to the Reader: This is a much rougher piece than the previous pieces because the argument is more complex. I ask that you please point out places where things are unclear and where claims are not rigorous.] In this fourth part of my series of criticisms of NHST, I’... [Read more...]

Introduction Continuing on with my series on the weaknesses of NHST, I’d like to focus on an issue that’s not specific to NHST, but rather one that’s relevant to all quantitative analysis: the destruction caused by an inappropriate reduction of dimensionality. In our case, we’ll be ... [Read more...]

Introduction This is my second post in a series describing the weaknesses of the NHST paradigm. In the first post, I argued that NHST is a dangerous tool for a community of researchers because p-values cannot be interpreted properly without perfect knowledge of the research practices of other scientists — knowledge ... [Read more...]

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At this Monday’s Montreal R User Group meeting, Arthur Charpentier gave an interesting talk on the subject of quantile regression. One of the main messages I took away from the workshop was that quantile regression can be used to determine if extreme events are becoming more extreme. The example ... [Read more...]

Yesterday I ran into an equation that was a sum of an exponential and a linear term: It doesn’t take long to figure out that there is no analytical solution, and so I set out to write some crappy numerical code. After wasting some time with a fixed point ... [Read more...]

Everyday, a poor soul tries to understand copulas by reading the corresponding Wikipedia page, and gives up in despair. The incomprehensible mess that one finds there gives the impression that copulas are about as accessible as tensor theory, which is a shame, because they are actually a very nice tool. ... [Read more...]

NERC recently funded the formation of the UK Lake Ecological Observation Network (UKLEON) as part of the its Networks of Sensors programme. UKLEON is lead by Ian Jones at CEH Lancaster. A fully-funded PhD project is associated with the UKLEON … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Earlier, I looked at the HadCRUT3vgl data set using generalized least squares to investigate whether the trend in temperature since 1995 was statistically significant. Here I want to follow-up one of the points from the earlier posting; namely using a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Yesterday (June 11, 2011) the BBC reported on comments by Prof. Phil Jones, of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia (UEA), that the warming experienced by the planet since 1995 was statistically significant. That the trend in … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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. ... [Read more...]

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Central Limit Theorem A nice illustration of the Central Limit Theorem by convolution.in R: Heaviside 0,1,0) }HH [Read more...]

Recently there was a lot of racket about results presented in papers by a pair Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler. Their papers gained a lot of attention both in the academic world as well as in media. In their papers they claim to provide evidence for social contagion (transmission through social ... [Read more...]

Well, that’s a good book that you shouldn’t miss “Introduction to Applied Bayesian Statistics and Estimation for Social Scientists”. Why you shouldn’t miss it? Coz, it’s practical and I mean p r a c t i c a l big time!!! I don’t own tons ... [Read more...]