Tag Archives: Statistics & Econometrics

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]

Informational entropy (student stuff)  [embedded content]

Statistik​ — vår tids religion Ingen tvekan råder om att ett helt annat ämne tagit över kontrollen när det gäller utbildningen i vetenskaplig metod inom nästan hela fältet, nämligen statistiken … Värdet hos det statistiska regelsystemet skall naturligtvis inte ifrågasättas, men det skall inte förglömmas att även andra former av reflektion odlas i vetenskapslandet. Inget enskilt ämne kan göra anspråk på hegemoni … John Maynard Keynes … pekar på något som kan...

Hidden Markov Models and Bayes Theorem for dummies  [embedded content]

“Getting philosophical” is not about articulating rarified concepts divorced from statistical practice. It is to provide tools to avoid obfuscating the terms and issues being bandied about … Do I hear a protest? “There is nothing philosophical about our criticism of statistical significance tests (someone might say). The problem is that a small P-value is invariably, and erroneously, interpreted as giving a small probability to the null hypothesis.” Really? P-values are not...