Publications by Luis
Doing Bayesian Data Analysis now in JAGS
Around Christmas time I presented my first impressions of Kruschke’s Doing Bayesian Data Analysis. This is a very nice book but one of its drawbacks was that part of the code used BUGS, which left mac users like me stuck. Kruschke has now made JAGS code available so I am happy clappy and looking forward to test this New Year present. In additi...
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R is a language
A commenter on this blog reminded me of one of the frustrating aspects faced by newbies, not only to R but to any other programming environment (I am thinking of typical students doing stats for the first time). The statement “R is a language” sounds perfectly harmless if you have previous exposure to programming. However, if you come from a ...
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Mid-January flotsam: teaching edition
I was thinking about new material that I will use for teaching this coming semester (starting the third week of February) and suddenly compiled the following list of links: William Briggs writes It is time to stop teaching Frequentism to non-statisticians in a paper submitted to The American Statistician. Clearly he doesn’t want t...
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Rstudio and asreml working together in a mac
December and January were crazy months, with a lot of travel and suddenly I found myself in February working in four parallel projects involving quantitative genetics data analyses. (I’ll write about some of them very soon) Anyhow, as I have pointed out in repeated occasions, I prefer asreml-R for mixed model analyses because I run out of funct...
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Early-February flotsam
Mike Croucher at Walking Randomly points out an interesting difference in operator precedence for several mathematical packages to evaluate a simple operation 2^3^4. It is pretty much a divide between Matlab and Excel (does the later qualify as mathematical software?) on one side with result 4096 (or (2^3)^4) and Mathematica, R and Python on the ...
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Oracle’s strange understanding of R users
After reading David Smith’s tweet on the price of Oracle R Enterprise (actually free, but it requires Oracle Data Mining at $23K/core as pointed out by Joshua Ulrich.) I went to Oracle’s site to see what was all about. Oracle has a very interesting concept of why we use R: Statisticians and data analysts like R because they typically don’t ...
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Revisiting homicide rates
A pint of R plotted an interesting dataset: intentional homicides in South America. I thought the graphs were pretty but I was unhappy about the way information was conveyed in the plots; relative risk should be very important but number of homicides is very misleading as it also relates to country population (this problem often comes up in our d...
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If you have to use circles…
Stats Chat is an interesting kiwi site—managed by the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland—that centers around the use and presentation of statistics in the media. This week there was an interesting discussion on one of those infographics that make you cringe: I understand the newspaper’s need to grab our attention, as we...
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Mid-February flotsam
This coming Monday we start the first semester in Canterbury (and in New Zealand for that matter). We are all looking forward to an earthquake-free year; more realistically, I’d be happy with low magnitude aftershocks. The Wall Street Journal reports that more pediatricians are ‘firing’ patients that refuse to use vaccines. I’m wonderin...
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Early-March flotsam
It has been a strange last ten days since we unexpectedly entered grant writing mode. I was looking forward to work on this issue near the end of the year but a likely change on funding agency priorities requires applying in a few weeks; unfortunately, it means that all this is happening at the same time I am teaching. As usual I got involved in...
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