Tag Archives: Statistics & Econometrics

Pólya urn models mathematics  [embedded content]

The limits of probabilistic reasoning Almost a hundred years after John Maynard Keynes wrote his seminal A Treatise on Probability (1921), it is still very difficult to find statistics books that seriously try to incorporate his far-reaching and incisive analysis of induction and evidential weight. The standard view in statistics — and the axiomatic probability theory underlying it — is to a large extent based on the rather simplistic idea that more is...

Bayesian statistics — an introduction If you look for a Bayesian statistics textbook accessible also to students with limited knowledge of statistics and math — this is the book!

Machine learning — getting results that are completely wrong Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong. Dr Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science” … The data sets are very large and expensive. But, according to Dr Allen, the answers they come up with are likely to...

Fat arms science … Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in...

The statistical crisis in science  [embedded content] Such a great guy. If only more academics could be like you, Andrew!

Gretl — econometrics made easy  [embedded content] Thanks to Allin Cottrell and Riccardo Lucchetti we today have access to a high-quality​ tool for doing and teaching econometrics — Gretl. And, best of all, it is totally free! Gretl is up to the tasks you may have, so why spend money on expensive commercial programs? The latest snapshot version of Gretl can be downloaded here. [And yes, I do know there’s another fabulously good and free program — R. But R...

Bayesian moons made of green cheese In other words, if a decision-maker thinks something cannot be true and interprets this to mean it has zero probability, he will never be influenced by any data, which is surely absurd. So leave a little probability for the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese will leave you unmoved. To get...

Machine learning — puzzling Big Data nonsense If we wanted highly probable claims, scientists would stick to​​ low-level observables and not seek generalizations, much less theories with high explanatory content. In this day​ of fascination with Big data’s ability to predict​ what book I’ll buy next, a healthy Popperian reminder is due: humans also want to understand and to explain. We want bold ‘improbable’ theories. I’m a little puzzled when I hear...

Gibbs sampling (student stuff)  [embedded content]