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Modeling scale usage heterogeneity the Bayesian way
Posts in my journal club category are my summaries and thoughts on journal articles I read. I’ve found I absorb material much better if I try to summarize it in a way that might make sense to someone...
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Effort or expression
From Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to be Happy: Difficulty has become repugnant because it denies entitlement, disenchants potential, limits mobility and...
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The price and payoff of Bayesian statistics
I’ve never totally understood why people complain so much about having to specify prior distributions in order to do Bayesian inference. Even if you’re doing frequentist statistics, you have to make...
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Two kinds of people in the world…
… those that like to classify people into different kinds and those that don’t. I’m a classifier. That’s why I’m intrigued by latent class analysis (LCA), where you statistically divide up people into...
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The central limit theorem
Ph.D. Topics : Statistics Why are so many quantities we measure in nature approximately normally distributed? The central limit theorem (CLT), a key tenet of probability theory, says that the average...
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The normal distribution
Ph.D. Topics : Statistics The normal distribution, or bell curve, is probably the most important probability distribution in statistics. Many quantities we observe are roughly normally distributed; the...
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Dissertation topic: Constructing predictive indexes
The actual working title of my dissertation is: Modeling Social Participation as Predictive of Life Satisfaction and Social Connectedness: Scale or Index? When I tell people my topic, I usually start...
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Honey, I shrunk the statistician
In my Ph.D. program, I learned all about how to analyze small data. I learned rules of thumb for how much data I needed to run a particular analysis, and what to do if I didn’t have enough. I worked...
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How data science is like magic
In The Magicians[1], Lev Grossman describes magic as it might exist, but he could as well be describing the real-world practice of statistical analysis or software development: As much as it was like...
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So you call yourself a data scientist?
Hilary Mason (in Glamour!) I just watched this video of Hilary Mason* talking about data mining. Aside from the obvious thoughts of what I could have done with my life if (1) I had majored in computer...
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Disciples of enumeration, beware
This kind of analysis doesn’t just end arguments it buries them and salts the earth —unless you are prepared to raise the stakes with your own Big Data-mining operation. Trevor Butterworth, The Awl In...
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Data science, Gladwell-style
Does Malcolm Gladwell’s brand of storytelling have any lessons for data scientists? Or is it unscientific pop-sci pablum? Gladwell specializes in uncovering exciting and surprising regularities about...
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Putting the science in data science
Data science is not just overhyped marketing BS, at least not if you are doing it right. Owning up to the title of data scientist [Sean McClure | Data Science Central]: To own up to the title of data...
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