I’ve been inspired by two recent talks describing the challenges of using instrumental variable (IV) methods. IV methods are used to estimate the causal effects of an exposure or intervention when there is unmeasured confounding. This estimated causal effect is very specific: the complier average causal effect (CACE). But, ...

This will be a non-technical post illustrating the problems with identifying treatment responders or non-responders using inappropriate within-group analyses. Specifically, I will show why it is pointless to try to identify a subgroup of non-responders using a naïve analysis of data from one treatment group only, even though we ...

Introduction These past few weeks I’ve been writing about a new package I created, MCHT. Those blog posts were basically tutorials demonstrating how to use the package. (Read the first in the series here.) I’m done for now explaining the technical details of the package. Now I’m ...

Introduction Domain squatting or URL hijacking is a straightforward attack that requires little skill. An attacker registers a domain that is similar to the target domain and hopes that a user accidentally visits the site. For example, if the domain is example.com, then a typo-squatter would register similar domains ...

No hables de futuro, es una ilusión cuando el Rock & Roll conquistó mi corazón (El Rompeolas, Loquillo y los Trogloditas) In this post I create flowers inspired in the Julia Sets, a family of fractal sets obtained from complex numbers, after being iterated by a holomorphic function. Despite ...

In this explainer I walk you through the steps I took to create a twitter bot that tweets daily about people who died on that date. I created a script that queries wikidata, takes that information and creates a sentence. That sentence is then tweeted. For example: A tweet I ...

Today, we will return to the Fama French (FF) model of asset returns and use it as a proxy for fitting and evaluating multiple linear models. In a previous post, we reviewed how to run the FF three-factor model on the returns of a portfolio. That is, we ran one ...

First Statistics Sunday in far too long! It's going to be a short one, but it describes a great trick I learned recently while completing a time study for our exams at work.To give a bit of background, this time study involves analzying time examinees ...

Introduction Data Pre-Processing Load Packages Scrape and Clean Data Pace of Play Overall Tempo Conference Tempo Conference Clustering High-Major vs. Mid-Major K-means The Best of the Rest Introduction With the recent start of the college basketball season, I thought it would be fun to explore how style of play varies ...

The Problem This week’s Riddler Express was more involved than I anticipated. The World Chess Championship is underway. We need to find the odds that the better player wins a 12-game match, given: One of the players is better than his opponent to th...

By Gabriel Vasconcelos and Yuri Fonseca The intuition Let us begin with a brief explanation about Benford’s law and why should it work as a fraud detector method. Given a set of numbers, the first thing we need to do … Continue reading →