Publications by Rasmus Bååth
A Speed Comparison Between Flexible Linear Regression Alternatives in R
Everybody loves speed comparisons! Is R faster than Python? Is dplyr faster than data.table? Is STAN faster than JAGS? It has been said that speed comparisons are utterly meaningless, and in general I agree, especially when you are comparing apples and oranges which is what I’m going to do here. I’m going to compare a couple of alternatives t...
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The Non-parametric Bootstrap as a Bayesian Model
The non-parametric bootstrap was my first love. I was lost in a muddy swamp of zs, ts and ps when I first saw her. Conceptually beautiful, simple to implement, easy to understand (I thought back then, at least). And when she whispered in my ear, “I make no assumptions regarding the underlying distribution”, I was in love. This love lasted rou...
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Big Data and Chess: What are the Predictive Point Values of Chess Pieces?
Who doesn’t like chess? Me! Sure, I like the idea of chess – intellectual masterminds battling each other using nothing but pure thought – the problem is that I tend to loose, probably because I don’t really know how to play well, and because I never practice. I do know one thing: How much the different pieces are worth, their point value...
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Big Data and Chess Follow-up: Predictive Piece Values Over the Course of a Game
In a previous post I used the the Million Base 2.2 chess data base to calculate the predictive piece values of chess pieces. It worked out pretty well and here, just for fun, I thought I would check out what happens with the predictive piece values over the course of a chess game. In the previous analysis, the data (1,000,000 chess positions) was...
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Hygge at UseR! 2015, Aalborg
hygge A Danish word (pronounced HU-guh) meaning social coziness. I.e. the feeling of a good social atmosphere. – Urban Dictionary Yes, there was plenty of hygge to go around this year’s UseR! that took place last week in Aalborg, Denmark. Everybody I’ve spoken with agrees that it was an extraordinary conference, from the interesting speak...
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Easy Bayesian Bootstrap in R
A while back I wrote about how the classical non-parametric bootstrap can be seen as a special case of the Bayesian bootstrap. Well, one difference between the two methods is that, while it is straightforward to roll a classical bootstrap in R, there is no easy way to do a Bayesian bootstrap. This post, in an attempt to change that, introduces a ...
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Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman: The Movie
This is a screencast of my UseR! 2015 presentation: Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman. Based on the original blog post it is a quick’n’dirty introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (and is also, in a sense, an introduction to Bayesian statistics in general). Here it is, if you have 15 minutes to...
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Basic MCMC and Bayesian statistics in… BASIC!
The BASIC programming language was at one point the most widely spread programming language. Many home computers in the 80s came with BASIC (like the Commodore 64 and the Apple II), and in the 90s both DOS and Windows 95 included a copy of the QBasic IDE. QBasic was also the first programming language I encountered (I used it to write a couple of...
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The Map of Romantic Kissing with Leaflet and R
Romantic kissing is a cultural universal, right? Nope! At least not if you are to believe Jankowiak et al. (2015) who surveyed a large number of cultures and found that “sexual-romantic kissing” occurred in far from all of them. For some reasons the paper didn’t include a world map with these kissers and non-kissers plotted out. So, with th...
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A Bayesian Model to Calculate Whether My Wife is Pregnant or Not
On the 21st of February, 2015, my wife had not had her period for 33 days, and as we were trying to conceive, this was good news! An average period is around a month, and if you are a couple trying to go triple, then a missing period is a good sign something is going on. But at 33 days, this was not yet a missing period, just a late one, so how g...
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