Posts Tagged ‘ science ’

Criticism 4 of NHST: No Mechanism for Producing Substantive Cumulative Knowledge

May 18, 2012
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In this fourth part of my series of criticisms of NHST, I’m going to focus on broad

Criticism 3 of NHST: Essential Information is Lost When Transforming 2D Data into a 1D Measure

May 14, 2012
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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 concerned with the loss of essential information caused by

Criticism 2 of NHST: NHST Conflates Rare Events with Evidence Against the Null Hypothesis

May 12, 2012
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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 that we cannot hope

Speeding up R with Intel’s Math Kernel Library (MKL)

May 2, 2012
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I did some comparisons of the generic BLAS with Intel's MKL (both sequential and parallel) on a Dell PowerEdge 610 server with dual hyperthreading 6-core 3.06GHz Xeon X5675 processors.  Here are the results from an R benchmarking script (Normal R ...

Insights into Quantile Regression from Arthur Charpentier

April 24, 2012
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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 given was hurricane intensity since 1978.

Lambert’s W function and the generalised logarithm

November 16, 2011
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$Lambert’s W function and the generalised logarithm$

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 iteration that did not really work,

October 28, 2011
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$Copulas made easy$

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. The only prerequisite is knowing

No lake is an island: PhD Opportunity

June 14, 2011
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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 →

June 12, 2011
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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 →

Global warming since 1995 ‘now significant’

June 11, 2011
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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 →