The number of comparisons is going to escalate quickly. If we have four flavors of ice cream, we go from Scenario 1 showing three significant variables in its model outputs to the rest of the scenarios only reporting one... Is this $p$-hacking? If you have to ask, it probably is.Read More →
I don't believe that responsible people should indulge in anything that can be even remotely considered ultimatums or threats. That is not the way to reach peaceful solutions.—President Eisenhower, July 8, 1959. Daniel Ellsberg and the science of extortion Bill Casselman University of British Columbia Daniel Ellsberg died just lastRead More →
Different sampling approaches exist that target different sub-populations to make sure they appear in the sample. To see these sampling approaches at work we are going to sample lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”… Sampled Poems Contain Multitudes Sara Stoudt Bucknell University The basic principle of statistical inferenceRead More →
Decoding, Gerrymanders, and Markov Chains David Austin Grand Valley State University In 2009, crypto miner James Howells of southern Wales mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins. That’s over $100 million even in today’s sinking crypto landscape. Thirteen years later, Howells has a plan, backed by venture capital,Read More →
Social media platforms connect users into massive graphs, with accounts as vertices and friendships as edges... Predicting friendships and other fun machine learning tasks with graphs Noah Giansiracusa Bentley University Artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs make the news headlines with increasing frequency these days. At least for the time being, AIRead More →
We can formulate this situation into an example of Simpson’s Paradox. When employee outcomes were examined overall, there was no evidence of discrimination between men and women. However, if employee outcomes were to be further broken down by race, there would have been a very clear discrepancy between the BlackRead More →
Many of the proposed strategies use the notions introduced by Claude Shannon to solve problems of communication… Wordle is a game of chance William Casselman University of British Columbia The game Wordle, which is found currently on the New York Times official Wordle site, can be played by anybody withRead More →
When we start to think more about it, more questions arise. What makes a line “good”? How do we tell if a line is the “best”? The Origins of Ordinary Least Squares Assumptions Some Are More Breakable Than Others Sara Stoudt Bucknell University Introduction Fitting a line to a setRead More →
Principal Component Analysis: Three Examples and some Theory Very often, especially in applications to the life sciences, useful low-dimensional projections exist and allow humans to grasp a data set that would otherwise be inscrutable. Tony Phillips Stony Brook University Introduction Principal component analysis (PCA), an algorithm for helping us understandRead More →
An epidemic is a sequence of random events If a contact is made, then whether or not infection is transferred is much like tossing a (loaded) coin. How can a simulation take all this uncertainty into account? Bill Casselman University of British Columbia Just recently, I started thinking about makingRead More →