Publications by Bob Carpenter
Drunk-under-the-lamppost testing
I’m writing a response here to Abraham Mathews’s post, Best practices for code review, R edition, because my comment there didn’t show up and I think the topic’s important. Mathews’s post starts out on the right track, then veers away from best practices in the section “What code should be reviewed?” where he says, …In general, ...
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Probabilities for action and resistance in Blades in the Dark
Later this week, I’m going to be GM-ing my first session of Blades in the Dark, a role-playing game designed by John Harper. We’ve already assembled a crew of scoundrels in Session 0 and set the first score. Unlike most of the other games I’ve run, I’ve never played Blades in the Dark, I’ve only seen it on YouTube (my fave so far is J...
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How many infectious people are likely to show up at an event?
Stephen Kissler and Yonatan Grad launched a Shiny app, Effective SARS-CoV-2 test sensitivity, to help you answer the question, How many infectious people are likely to show up to an event, given a screening test administered n days prior to the event? Here’s a screenshot. The app is based on some modeling they did with Stan followed by sim...
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My slides and paper submissions for Prob Prog 2021
Prob Prog 2021 just ended. Prob Prog is the big (250 registered attendees, and as many as 180 actually online at one point) probabilistic programming conference. It’s a very broadly scoped conference. The online version this year went very smoothly. It ran a different schedule every day to accommodate different time zones. So I wound up m...
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It’s so hard to compare the efficiency of MCMC samplers
I thought I’d share a comment I made on Perry de Valpine‘s post on the NIMBLE blog, A close look at some linear model MCMC comparisons. Perry was posting about a paper that tried to compare efficiency of Stan, NIMBLE, and JAGS for some linear modeling problems. You can find the link in Perry’s post if you really care and then the paper...
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