Publications by andrew
chartsnthings !
Yair pointed me to this awesome blog of how the NYT people make their graphs. This blows away all other stat graphics blogs (including this one). Lots of examples from mockup to first tries to final version. I recognize a lot of what they’re doing from my own experience. Also from my experience it’s hard to get all these details down: on...
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The first version of my “inference from iterative simulation using parallel sequences” paper!
From August 1990. It was in the form of a note sent to all the people in the statistics group of Bell Labs, where I’d worked that summer. To all: Here’s the abstract of the work I’ve done this summer. It’s stored in the file, /fs5/gelman/abstract.bell, and copies of the Figures 1-3 are on Trevor’s desk. Any comments are of course appr...
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For those interested in knitr with Rmarkdown to beamer slides
Seeing as more people were interested in how I created my slides for the R conference than what was actually on them, I posted my source and commands to github. I used knitr with Rmarkdown source to convert to markdown that went into pandoc to create beamer slide. Enjoy! https://gist.github.com/2955183 Related To leave a comment for the author...
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Will Tiger Woods catch Jack Nicklaus? And a discussion of the virtues of using continuous data even if your goal is discrete prediction
I know next to nothing about golf. My mini-golf scores typically approach the maximum of 7 per hole, and I’ve never actually played macro-golf. I did publish a paper on golf once (A Probability Model for Golf Putting, with Deb Nolan), but it’s not so rare for people to publish papers on topics they know nothing about. Those who can’t, re...
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Decline Effect in Linguistics?
Josef Fruehwald writes: In the past few years, the empirical foundations of the social sciences, especially Psychology, have been coming under increased scrutiny and criticism. For example, there was the New Yorker piece from 2010 called “The Truth Wears Off” about the “decline effect,” or how the effect size of a phenomenon appears to de...
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Moving beyond hopeless graphics
I was at a talk awhile ago where the speaker presented tables with 4, 5, 6, even 8 significant digits even though, as is usual, only the first or second digit of each number conveyed any useful information. A graph would be better, but even if you’re too lazy to make a plot, a bit of rounding would seem to be required. I mentioned this to a co...
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Stan is fast
10,000 iterations for 4 chains on the (precompiled) efficiently-parameterized 8-schools model: > date () [1] "Thu Aug 30 22:12:53 2012" > fit3 <- stan (fit=fit2, data = schools_dat, iter = 1e4, n_chains = 4) SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 1). Iteration: 10000 / 10000 [100%] (Sampling) SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 2...
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Is it meaningful to talk about a probability of “65.7%” that Obama will win the election?
The other day we had a fun little discussion in the comments section of the sister blog about the appropriateness of stating forecast probabilities to the nearest tenth of a percentage point. It started when Josh Tucker posted this graph from Nate Silver: My first reaction was: this looks pretty but it’s hyper-precise. I’m a big fan of Nat...
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An epithet I can live with
Here. Indeed, I’d much rather be a legend than a myth. I just want to clarify one thing. Walter Hickey writes: [Antony Unwin and Andrew Gelman] collaborated on this presentation where they take a hard look at what’s wrong with the recent trends of data visualization and infographics. The takeaway is that while there have been great leaps in ...
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The statistics software signal
Tyler Cowen links to a post by Sean Taylor, who writes the following about users of R: You are willing to invest in learning something difficult. You do not care about aesthetics, only availability of packages and getting results quickly. To me, R is easy and Sas is difficult. I once worked with some students who were running Sas and the output...
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