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24 Days of R: Day 17
I couldn't manage to find time yesterday, so today I'm going to try and catch up with two posts. In the first, I'm going to talk about a package I've been gradually working on over the course of the...
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24 Days of R: Day 18
Earlier today, while looking for something else, I managed to stumble across a presentation given at the 2010 CAS RPM. (Egregious self-promotion: I'll be leading a day-long workshop at next year's RPM...
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24 Days of R: Day 19
Carrying on with the multi-level model, I'm going to look at the paid and incurred workers comp losses for a large number of insurance companies. This is a similar exercise to what I did last night,...
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24 Days of R: Day 20
Some time ago, I was doing some analysis and trying to determine whether or not there was a predictive variable for a binomial response. I ran logistic regressions for about half a dozen variables in...
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24 Days of R: Day 21
I drove through Tennessee today. Despite having grown up in Kentucky, I had never really noticed the Tennessee flag, but earlier this year, while in Nashville, I saw it and thought it was one of the...
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24 Days of R: Day 22
I like to use Goodreads to keep track of which books I'm reading (and not reading). They very helpfully sent me an e-mail to inform me how many books I've read so far in 2013. The number is 19. Hardly...
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24 Days of R: Day 23
Penultimate post, I'm going to take a quick look at the Gini indicator for wealth inequality. Data comes from the World Bank. I've downloaded the zipped file, decompressed it and given it a different...
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24 Days of R: Day 24
OK, so I phoned it in last night. Final post and maybe this one will be a bit better. Can't recall what got me thinking about it, but I was running over the issue of school performance and the...
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An idiot learns Bayesian analysis: Part 1
I've done a dreadful job of reading The Theory That Would Not Die, but several weeks ago I somehow managed to read the appendix. Here the author gives a short explanation of Bayes' theorem using...
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An idiot learns Bayesian analysis: Part 2
A week ago, I wrote a bit about my personal journey to come to grips with Bayesian inference. I referred to the epiphany that when we're talking about Bayesian analysis, what we're talking about- in a...
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Another skewed normal distribution
At the CLRS last year, Glenn Meyers talked about something very near to my heart: a skewed normal distribution. In loss reserving (and I'm sure, many other contexts) standard linear regression is less...
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Triangle Open Data Day 2014
A rare live blog post today. I'm writing this from Triangle Open Data Day 2014. This will basically be a page of links that I'll try to get around to later. GIS resources: QGIS – an open source GIS...
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Watching Africa from a plane
I wrote this 8 or 9 days ago, while on a plane and am just now getting around to posting it. It's either 7:12 PM Friday or 2:12 AM Saturday. I'm somewhere over the Mediterranean, having just passed...
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Recursive assignment
Here’s yet another example where I just need to read the help files. Before I go on, I should add my own notion as to why that’s not always easy to do. On loads of message boards, you’ll see people...
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Stuff I’ve gotten horribly wrong
I'm the first (I hope) to admit when I've gotten something wrong. I like to think I'm humble enough to realize that there are limits to my knowledge. Actually, humility doesn't enter into it. Every day...
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An Idiot Learns Bayesian Analysis: Part 3
A week or so ago, the grand Magus over at lamages.blogspot.com/ published a great, quick thought exercise taken from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Here are the particulars of the...
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Visualizing the History of Epidemics
I really like National Geographic. Their magazine is great, their television documentaries are done well and they helped give me a lifelong love of maps. They generate very good information and help...
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Makefiles and RMarkdown
Quite some time ago (October 2013, according to Amazon), I bought a copy of “Reproducible Research with R and RStudio” by Christopher Gandrud. And it was awesome. Since then, I’ve been using knitr and...
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