Publications by matloff
Innumeracy, Statistics and R
A couple of years ago, when an NPR journalist was interviewing me, the conversation turned to quantitative matters. The reporter said, only half jokingly, “We journalists are innumerate and proud.” 🙂 Some times it shows, badly. This morning a radio reporter stated, “Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders among South Carolina African-America...
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Quick Intro to NMF (the Method and the R Package)
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a popular tool in many applications, such as image and text recognition. If you’ve ever wanted to learn a little bit about NMF, you can do so right here, in this blog post, which will summarize the (slightly) longer presentation here. The R package NMF will be used as illustration. Given a u x v matrix ...
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After 150 Years, the ASA Says No to p-values
Sadly, the concept of p-values and significance testing forms the very core of statistics. A number of us have been pointing out for decades that p-values are at best underinformative and often misleading. Almost all statisticians agree on this, yet they all continue to use it and, worse, teach it. I recall a few years ago, when Frank Harrell and...
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Further Comments on the ASA Manifesto
On Tuesday I commented here on the ASA (in their words) “Position on p-values: context, process, and purpose.” A number of readers replied, some of them positive, some mistakenly thinking I don’t think statistical inferences are needed, and some claiming I overinterpreted the ASA’s statement. I’ll respond in the current post, and will...
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P-values: the Continuing Saga
I highly recommend the blog post by Yoav Benjamini and Tal Galili in defense of (carefully used) p-values. I disagree with much of it, but the exposition is very clear, and there is a nice guide to relevant R tools, including for simultaneous inference, a field in which Yoav is one of the most prominent, indeed pre-eminent, researchers. I do have...
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Even Businessweek Is Talking about P-Values
The March 28 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has a rather good summary of the problems of p-values, even recommending the use of confidence intervals and — wonder of wonders — “[looking] at the evidence as a whole.” What, statistics can’t make our decisions for us? 🙂 It does make some vague and sometimes puzzling statements, but fo...
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GTC 2016
I will be an invited speaker at GTC 2016, a large conference on GPU computation. The main topic will be usage of GPU in conjunction with R, and I will also speak on my Software Alchemy method, especially in relation to GPU computing.. GTC asked me to notify my “network” about the event, and this blog is the closest thing I have. My talk is...
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Talk on regtools and P-Values
I’m deeply greatful to Hui Lin and the inimitable Yihui Xie for arranging for me to give a “virtual seminar talk” to the Central Iowa R Users Group. You can view my talk, including an interesting Q&A session, online. (The actual start is at 0:34.) There are two separate topics, my regtools package (related to my forthcoming book, From Linea...
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Student-Run Conference in Data Science
I’d like to urge all of you in Northern California to attend iidata, a student-run conference in data science, to be held on the UC Davis campus on May 21. According to the Web page, iidata is a one-day, collegiate-level Data Science convention aimed at educating students in the new, thrilling field of data science. We welcome all students, reg...
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Latest on the Julia Language (vs. R)
I’ve written before about the Julia language. As someone who is very active in the R community, I am biased of course, and have been (and remain) a skeptic about Julia. But I would like to report on a wonderful talk I attended today at Stanford. To my surprise and delight, the speaker, Viral Shah of Julia Computing Inc, focused on the “comp...
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