Publications by Rasmus Bååth
Announcing
pingr is an R package that contains one function, ping(), with one purpose: To go ping on whatever platform you are on (thanks to the audio package). It is intended to be useful, for example, if you are running a long analysis in the background and want to know when it is ready. It’s also useful if you want to irritate colleagues. You could, fo...
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Bayesian First Aid: One Sample and Paired Samples t-test
Student’s t-test is a staple of statistical analysis. A quick search on Google Scholar for “t-test” results in 170,000 hits in 2013 alone. In comparison, “Bayesian” gives 130,000 hits while “box plot” results in only 12,500 hits. To be honest, if I had to choose I would most of the time prefer a notched boxplot to a t-test. The t-te...
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Bayesian First Aid: Two Sample t-test
As spring follows winter once more here down in southern Sweden, the two sample t-test follows the one sample t-test. This is a continuation of the Bayesian First Aid alternative to the one sample t-test where I’ll introduce the two sample alternative. It will be a quite short post as the two sample alternative is just more of the one sample al...
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Oldies but Goldies: Statistical Graphics Books
I just wanted to plug for three classical books on statistical graphics that I really enjoyed reading. The books are old (that is, older than me) but still relevant and together they give a sense of the development of exploratory graphics in general and the graphics system in R specifically as all three books were written at Bell Labs where the S-...
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A Hack to Create Matrices in R, Matlab style
The Matlab syntax for creating matrices is pretty and convenient. Here is a 2×3 matrix in Matlab syntax where , marks a new column and ; marks a new row: [1, 2, 3; 4, 5, 6] ...
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Bayesian First Aid: Pearson Correlation Test
Correlation does not imply causation, sure but, as Edward Tufte writes, “it sure is a hint.” The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient is perhaps one of the most common ways of looking for such hints and this post describes the Bayesian First Aid alternative to the classical Pearson correlation test. Except for being based on Bayesia...
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Jeffreys’ Substitution Posterior for the Median: A Nice Trick to Non-parametrically Estimate the Median
While reading up on quantile regression I found a really nice hack described in Bayesian Quantile Regression Methods (Lancaster & Jae Jun, 2010). It is called Jeffreys’ substitution posterior for the median, first described by Harold Jeffreys in his Theory of Probability, and is a non-parametric method for approximating the posterior of the med...
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The Most Comprehensive Review of Comic Books Teaching Statistics
As I’m more or less an autodidact when it comes to statistics, I have a weak spot for books that try to introduce statistics in an accessible and pedagogical way. I have therefore collected what I believe are all books that introduces statistics using comics (at least those written in English). What follows are highly subjective reviews of thos...
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Bayesian First Aid: Test of Proportions
Does pill A or pill B save the most lives? Which web design results in the most clicks? Which in vitro fertilization technique results in the largest number of happy babies? A lot of questions out there involves estimating the proportion or relative frequency of success of two or more groups (where success could be a saved life, a click on a link...
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beepr (former pingr) is on CRAN. It’s easier than ever to make R go beep!
Even though I said it would never happen, my silly package with the sole purpose of playing notification sounds is now on CRAN. Big thanks to the CRAN maintainers for their patience! For instant gratification run the following in R to install beepr and make R produce a notification sound: install.packages("beepr") library(beepr) beep() ...
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