Publications by andrew
Job opening! Come work with us!
Postdoctoral position in statistical modeling of social networks A full-time postdoctoral position is available beginning Fall 2014 in the research group of Tian Zheng and Andrew Gelman working on statistical analysis and modeling of social network data, in close cooperation with our experimental collaborators. Four key papers of this project so ...
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The Green Number Effect
Following up on a suggestion from my previous post, here are the statistics for medal count versus age. Every point on the plot is the number (see colour legend on right) of athletes who have achieved a given number of medals by a particular age. There is clear evidence of a Green Number Effect: many people hang on for ten medals and then pack i...
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Job openings at conservative political analytics firm!
After posting that announcement about Civis Analytics, I wrote, “If a reconstituted Romney Analytics team is hiring, let me know and I’ll post that ad too.” Adam Schaeffer obliged: Not sure about Romney’s team, but Evolving Strategies is looking for sharp folks who lean right: Evolving Strategies is a political communications research f...
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Are Green Number Runners More Likely to Bail?
Comrades Marathon runners are awarded a permanent green race number once they have completed 10 journeys between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. For many runners, once they have completed the race a few times, achieving a green number becomes a possibility. And once the idea takes hold, it can become something of a compulsion. I can testify to this:...
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Please send all comments to /dev/ripley
Trey Causey asks, Has R-help gotten meaner over time?: I began by using Scrapy to download all the e-mails sent to R-help between April 1997 (the earliest available archive) and December 2012. . . . We each read 500 messages and coded them in the following categories: -2 Negative and unhelpful -1 Negative but helpful 0 No obviously valence or r...
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Priors
Nick Firoozye writes: While I am absolutely sympathetic to the Bayesian agenda I am often troubled by the requirement of having priors. We must have priors on the parameter of an infinite number of model we have never seen before and I find this troubling. There is a similarly troubling problem in economics of utility theory. Utility is on consum...
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Optimising a Noisy Objective Function
I am busy with a project where I need to calibrate the Heston Model to some Asian options data. The model has been implemented as a function which executes a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. As a result, the objective function is rather noisy. There are a number of algorithms for dealing with this sort of problem, and here I simply give a brief ove...
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Comrades Marathon Inference Trees
Following up on my previous posts regarding the results of the Comrades Marathon, I was planning on putting together a set of models which would predict likelihood to finish and probable finishing time. Along the way I got distracted by something else that is just as interesting and which produces results which readily yield to qualitative inter...
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A Chart of Recent Comrades Marathon Winners
Continuing on my quest to document the Comrades Marathon results, today I have put together a chart showing the winners of both the men and ladies races since 1980. Click on the image below to see a larger version. The analysis started off with the same data set that I was working with before, from which I extracted only the records for the winn...
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Uncertainty in parameter estimates using multilevel models
David Hsu writes: I have a (perhaps) simple question about uncertainty in parameter estimates using multilevel models — what is an appropriate threshold for measure parameter uncertainty in a multilevel model? The reason why I ask is that I set out to do a crossed two-way model with two varying intercepts, similar to your flight simulator exam...
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