statistics
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Stanford Invents AI Gaydar, Flubs Write-Up
Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinsksi, researchers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, have developed a neural-net classifier that purportedly detects sexual orientation (in caucasians). The authors report an avalanche of experimental results, and claim the classifier can “correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women.” OK, that’s the Read more
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R Tutorial: the non-linear equation solver
Need a numerical solution to simultaneous non-linear equations? The nleqslv package is just what you’re looking for! The coding required is minimal; just define the equations you want solved in a function, set some initial values, and let ‘er rip. Here’s an example that uses the method of moments to estimate the parameters of a Read more
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Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated
The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril. begins William Davies tale of woe in the Guardian. Unfortunately, he confuses credible statistics with modern state-istics*; and seems impervious to the Read more
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Multiple Comparisons, Made Easy
Adrian Colyer at the morning paper, takes a stab at explaining the problem with p-values and multiple comparisons. He shoots! He scores! The crowd* goes wild! Tip from an O’Reilly Daily Newsletter, which I found languishing in Clutter purgatory. *OK, the crowd of two or three statistics lecturers who struggle to explain the multiple comparison Read more
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When Bayesian Statistics Broke into History
Wonderful article here about the Mosteller and Wallace analysis of the twelve Federalist Papers, the ones of disputed authorship–was it Madison or Hamilton who wrote them? With a nice, easy-to-understand explanation of the Bayesian methodology they used. Tip from Real Clear Life. Read more
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An end run around an impossible integral
Ever-insightful polymath John Cook shows how to integrate the Gaussian PDF, in less time than it takes to make breakfast. The trick? Coordinate transformations and the Jacobian are your friends. A suitably-embellished version of Cook’s post will appear in my lecture notes in the Spring semester. Thanks, J.C. Read more
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Rating a Published Clinical Trial…
…can be done in 10 minutes or less, using the Jadad score. There’s a full explanation in the original paper, but suffice it to say, it’s pretty easy to identify sketchy studies using this method. Aaron Carroll, writing in the New York Times, shows how this affects the credibility of nutrition research. For those who Read more
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I guess it depends on who’s asking…
If I asked this question of any of my students, I’d be tagged as a stone-cold racist. But the US Census Bureau is going to ask each an every one of us. Tip from newgeography, where they have the full skinny. Read more
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R Tutorial: Correlation
Fisher’s iris dataset is the basis for this extended example in the calculation and visualization of correlations. The ggpairs() function gives an impressive coded scatterplot matrix. And an old friend makes a last-minute cameo appearance. Update: Dirk Eddelbuettel just released tint 0.0.3 (tint is not Tufte) with some nifty examples. I wanted to try it Read more
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Guys Crush Math SAT
No ability differences between men and women? Then what’s up with this? Read more
The Random Texan 