Statistics at UTSA

I just stumbled onto another classic paper: Lindley, D., "A Statistical Paradox," Biometrika 44(1/2) 187-192 (1957). P-values and posterior probabilities don’t always tell the same story, so beware! Tip from Amy Perfors at the Social Science Statistics Blog. Read more

In a previous post, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure which paper of Brad Efron’s was the best for introducing stats majors to the bootstrap.  Dr Kannan, my department chair, set me straight. Efron and Tibshirani, "Bootstrap Methods for Standard Errors, Confidence Intervals, and Other Measures of Statistical Accuracy," Statistical Science 1(1), 54-75 (1986). Read more

The latests in the Required Readings for Aspiring Statisticians: Hastie and Tibshirani, "Generalized Additive Models," Statistical Science, 1(3), 297-310 (1986).  These things are to loess curves what a BMW is to a baby buggy.  Dr Ko put us hip to GAMs in his advanced survival course. Read more

Of course, everyone doing categorical analysis needs to read about Fisher’s exact test: Fisher, R. A., " The Interpretation of Experimental Four-fold Tables. " Science, 94: 210-211 (1941) The University of Adelaide has done us all a great service by establishing an online library of Fisher’s work–there’s some amazing stuff there. Read more

Entropy anyone? Statistics became inextricably wedded to electrical engineering with this paper: Shannon, C., "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948. As usual, Wikipedia has a great bio on Claude Shannon, who’s also responsible for most of the mathematical formalisms we use to analyze Read more

Here’s another paper every aspiring young statistician should read: Markowitz, H., "Portfolio Selection", The Journal of Finance, 7:1, 77-91 (March 1952). The foundation of modern portfolio theory. The paper has been criticized, amplified, even vilified, but it won Markowitz a share of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. The idea is pretty easy: get Read more

I had a long chat yesterday with Bill England, Acquisitions Editor for Kendall/Hunt Publishing. I was surprised to hear that these folks can make money with press runs of as few as 200 paperback textbooks. Bill was interested in my idea of a supplemental text for statistics courses consisting of original papers outlining many of Read more

We’ve had a spate of handicrafts here in the department this month, but This is a little over the top. Read more

People who discuss teaching with me soon learn that I’m a big fan of the late Frederick Mosteller, and that one of my favorite undergraduate texts was Tanur and Mosteller’s Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown (SAGTU). This book is a collection of essays about applications of statistics; all the essays are written for a Read more

   Thursday, September 28, marked the third week that the department has held its regular 3-5pm faculty "tea," and each time has been a resounding success.  Our department chairman, Dr. Nandini Kannan, had been advocating a regular tea for the past two years, but it was a strong push from Dr. Daijin Ko, who missed Read more