Author Archives: rpg

Oh poor me. I’m going to a couple of meetings over the next couple of weeks (the ISEC in St. Andrews followed by the IBC, to celebrate the invention of the t-distribution). Of course, I can’t take The Beast with … Continue reading →

This is all very surprising – nobody from nature network seems to be an elitist bastard. They even have a special badge for Henry: My excuse for not joining in is I’m just a pleb with pretensions. The Beast, on … Continue reading →

David Basanta pointed out a provocative article in Wired, in which the author claimed that we won’t need to think about it any more, we can just throw it into a big computer along with an SVM1 or a NN2. … Continue reading →

Just a few things, as it’s Friday and I have The Beast sat on me.

Yesterday I found a long tube in my departmental pigeonhole. This was something of a surprise. Luckily it all became clear. The tube contained a poster, and this certificate:

In 1972, Prof. Sir. David R. Cox F.R.S. and statistical deity published one of the all-time great papers1, where he introduced a neat idea into survival analysis which is now called the Cox Proportional Hazards model. Because survival analyses are … Continue reading →

Now this is fun for a Friday evening1. Apparently the good (and possibly not so good) people of Washington D.C. have discovered that the quickest way to manage the commute near the airport there is to buy a cup of … Continue reading →

This morning I got the usual update from arXiv (that’s a chi, not an X, folks!) with the list of newly uploaded manuscripts. Including this one: Bandit Exploration How could you not be interested?

Just because I’m in a maths and stats department Of course, statistics is a part of all of these subjects, so we get to choose how pure we want to be. Oh, I should also point out that our department … Continue reading →

One of the better books about statistics is Abelson’s Statistics as Principled Argument“. Amongst the many words of wisdom, he gives us this useful dictum: Chance is Lumpy