Publications by John Myles White
EM and Regression Mixture Modeling
Last night, Drew Conway showed me a fascinating graph that he made from the R package data we’ve recently collected from CRAN. That graph will be posted and described in the near future, because it has some really interesting implications for the structure of the R package world. But for the moment I want to talk about the use of mixture modeli...
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Promising R Packages
As a quick note, here are two R packages that were mentioned to me recently and that look promising: reldist and mixtools. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: John Myles White » Statistics. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many ...
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The Answer Depends on the Question
To quote from the preface to the first edition in Jeffreys (1961): ‘It is sometimes considered a paradox that the answer depends not only on the observations but on the question; it should be a platitude.’1 Generalized Linear Models : P. McCullagh and J. A. Nelder : Chapter 2 Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the lin...
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The NYC Marathon
New York’s annual marathon took place yesterday. Watching a bit of it on television with my friends, I was struck by the much earlier starting time for women than men. Specifically, professional women started running yesterday at 9:10 AM, while professional men start running at 9:40 AM. (This information comes from the runner’s handbook.) I w...
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A Draft of ProjectTemplate v0.2-1
I’ve just uploaded a new binary of ProjectTemplate to GitHub. This is a draft version of the next release, v0.2-1, which includes some fairly substantial changes and is backwards incompatible in several ways with previous versions of ProjectTemplate. Foremost of the changes is that most of the logic for load.project() is now built into the load...
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Academic Jargon: Field-Specific Insults
Every academic field seems to develop a set of generic insults based on their intellectual toolkit. Here are two examples I hear often: Probabilists and Statisticians: “I think that’s an interesting case, but it’s in a set with measure zero.” Economists: “X group’s behavior is clearly rent-seeking.” Do any readers have good exampl...
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Inconsistencies in Bayesian Models of Decision-Making
But modeling devices that make sense for an unbiased decisionmaker may not make sense for a biased one. For example, why would individuals have priors and posteriors if they are destined to apply Bayes’ law incorrectly?1 A question I often ask myself. Wolfgang Pesendorfer : Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A Review Essay on Advances in Behav...
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Modern Science and the Bayesian-Frequentist Controversy
The Bayesian-Frequentist debate reflects two different attitudes to the process of doing science, both quite legitimate. Bayesian statistics is well-suited to individual researchers, or a research group, trying to use all the information at its disposal to make the quickest possible progress. In pursuing progress, Bayesians tend to be aggressive ...
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Review of R Graphs Cookbook
The kind people at Packt Publishing recently asked me to review one of their newest R books: the R Graphs Cookbook. In general, I think pretty highly of the book: it provides a nice overview of the basic tools for visualizing data in R. If you’re just getting started with creating graphs in R, this book could be a very valuable resource. It’s...
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Canabalt Revisited: Gamma Distributions, Multinomial Distributions and More JAGS Goodness
Introduction Neil Kodner recently got me interested again in analyzing Canabalt scores statistically by writing a great post in which he compared the average scores across iOS devices. Thankfully, Neil’s made his code and data freely available, so I’ve been revising my original analyses using his new data whenever I can find a free minute. Re...
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