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For the last decade or so, the go-to software for Bayesian statisticians has been BUGS (and later the open-source incarnation, OpenBugs, or JAGS). BUGS is used for multi-level modeling: using a specialized notation, you can define random variables of various distributions, set Bayesian priors for their parameters, and create the ... [Read more...]

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Here is the list  of courses I wish to teach next year at Chiang Mai School of Economics, not so sure about the demand there! Undergraduate (B.Econ.) ECON 304: Economics Statistics (with R) ECON 408: Research Design in Economics ECON 417: Managerial Economics ECON 419: Economic Theory and Entrepreneurship ECON 443: Industrial Economics ECON 4... [Read more...]

Spearman’s Rho Rank Correlation There are generally three types of correlation that a researcher may encounter: Pearson’s r, Kendall’s Tau, and Spearman’s Rho.  They each have their own uses and applications depending on the da... [Read more...]

It's a wonderful thing when people make interesting data sets available to the public. When Thomas Jones wrote a paper in Econometrics about the growth of US retail giant Walmart, he made the data he collected about every Walmart store opening in history (location and date) available to the public. ... [Read more...]

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Context: I work with data from non-profit organizations, and so a big concern in many of my analyses is if and how much people are donating from one year to the next.  One of the  things I normally like to do … Continue reading → [Read more...]

You've probably heard (or seen in TV shows) how the unique pattern of rifling in a gunbarrel generates forensic evidence: microscopic scoring on the bullets left at the scene of the crime can be linked to the shooter by matching the marks to the firearm. What you might not know ... [Read more...]

After a sunny weekend to unpack and unwind, I am now back to my normal schedule, on my way to Paris-Dauphine for an R (second-chance) exam. Except for confusing my turn signal for my wiper, thanks to two weeks of intensive driving in four Australian states!, things are thus back ... [Read more...]

I’m sure that Carl Bacon[1] sighs deeply when he reads such headlines, but it is clearly appropriate in this case. Perhaps you remember that I proposed a Google Summer of Code project for 2012 around a considerable code contribution to PerformanceAnalytics from Diethelm Wuertz at ETHZ. That code was focused ... [Read more...]

After generating a few interactive charts with googleVis, I realized that it’s a great way to visualize numeric data, especially multi-dimentional data. Days ago, my colleague sent me a picture taken by Curiosity from Mars. He was crazy about it … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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 → [Read more...]

RealClimate.org used the R language and data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center to create this chart showing the extent of Arctic sea-ice in each year since satellite observations began in 1978, and the current extent of ice coverage (in red). Even though there are several weeks of ... [Read more...]

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Two significant R community milestones were achieved over the weekend. Firstly, the number of community-contributed R packages on CRAN is now above 4000. (As of this writing, it's 4004.) Figure 10 of The Popularity of Data Analysis Software charts the exponential growth of R packages: at the end of last year the figure ... [Read more...]

Economic geography of the eastern USA circa 1999, median incomes by zip code Code and data source to follow in a longer post. [Read more...]

It’s already midnight. I’m sitting near my bed. And before going to bed, I’ll type my last post on London 2012 Olympics. Olympic games are not only individual competitions, but also the reflections of countries’ strength. This is one reason why Olympics data … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study, published in March, found that professional American football (NFL) players lived longer, on average, than similar "mere mortals" in the general population. Football is a dangerous sport, so that might seem surprising at first, until you consider the fact that NFL ... [Read more...]