Bayesian credible intervals in the mainstream medical literature
I have sometimes heard complaints from collaborators that it will be impossible to have their work published in the mainstream literature unless a p-value is reported. This post is to report yet...
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Bank of America 1% Cash Rewards Aren't Really 1%
Bank of America (BoA) has a "Cash Rewards" credit card that pays "1% cash back everywhere, every time"1. But if you read the fine print, it's clear that the reward is almost always less than 1%. Here's...
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Revised graph for BAC 1% cash rewards
Thanks to Anthony Damico who alerted me to an error in the Bank of America's 1% cash rewards figure in my last post. The plot shows the true reward percentage as a function of purchase amount. A key...
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My Picture in the Vanderbilt Reporter
My picture made the front page of The Reporter, the Vanderbilt University Medical Center weekly paper, for an article about our department's biostatistics clinics. By sheer luck, I was wearing a tie...
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Informative Graphics on Taxes and the Economy
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service0 made news1 when a report the service had prepared was withdrawn due to pressure from Republican leaders. The report - titled Taxes and the Economy: An...
View ArticleBreakthroughs in the sas7bdat Reverse Engineering Effort
Due largely to the work of Clint Cummins, the sas7bdat file format has become a bit less shrouded. In particular, we now know the following: how to detect files with compressed data (and fail...
View ArticleMy fiscal cliff letter to congress
The ASA recently sent out an email asking its members to contact their representatives in congress to urge them to avoid the 8.2% cuts to NIH, NSF, and federal statistical agencies. I had been meaning...
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Simulated Power/Precision Analysis
I cringe when I see research proposals that describe a sophisticated statistical approach, yet do not evaluate this approach in their power/precision/sample size planning. It's often the case that a...
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Generalized Pairs Plot: It's about time!
JW Emerson, WA Green, B Schloerke, J Crowley, D Cook, H Hofmann, H Wickham (2013) The Generalized Pairs Plot. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 22(1). Here's a free preprint version....
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Identify 2/3 vacation photos, win $5 Starbucks gift card
I have a $5 Starbucks gift card that I simply can't remember to use; I've had it since Christmas. So, I will mail it (within the U.S.A.) to the first commenter who can identify the longitude/latitude...
View ArticleHurray! An R Connections API!
I waited until April 3 to post this, so it wouldn't be taken as an April Fool's joke! A recent R News item announces that we now have a bona fide mechanism to create custom connections in R! This makes...
View ArticleIndividual vs. Group Incentive for Weight Loss
A new Annals of Internal Medicine article describes a study that compares two employer-sponsored financial incentive programs for promoting weight loss among obese employees. I first read about the...
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Descending Text in Righthand Margin of R Graphics à la mtext
There was an R-help thread in January regarding text in the righthand margin of an R graphic, where the text should be rendered in reading order from top to bottom. The base R function mtext is used to...
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A Recipe for Trellis/Faceted Plots Using Base R Graphics
I frequently use lattice and ggplot2 to create trellis/faceted graphics. But, I gave up using these packages in a recent application, where I had initially constructed a complex graphic using the base...
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Usurious Letter From Volkswagen Credit
We have a loan with Volkswagen Credit (VC), and today received an offer to postpone our December payment of $447.50, for a small fee of $25. VC does a good job of making the offer read like a friendly...
View ArticleImage CGI with R
I received an email recently with a question about using R in the common gateway interface (CGI) framework to create and pass image data to the web browser. I posted to stackoverflow about this some...
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Alternatives to model diagnostics for statistical inference?
Consider the problem of making statistical inferences, as opposed to predictions. The product of statistical inference is a probabilistic statement about a population quantity, for example a 100(1-)%...
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Making inferences about unusual population quantities.
This post builds on my last: Alternatives to model diagnostics for statistical inference?, where I had claimed that we could make quality inferences about the best linear approximation to a quadratic...
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