Bintong Chen is Thinking About Posting on Twitter
Here is a picture of Bintong: He is one of the most brilliant minds on the planet. Reach out to him and tell him you want him to post on Twitter. His thoughts need sharing.
Beginner’s Guide to Stan Reference Models (User Manual v2.16)
The Stan modeling language manual http://mc-stan.org/users/documentation/ provides an extensive collection of example models. These example models help Stan users understand the modeling language and modeling techniques as they learn this powerful tool. Due to its power and ability to handle many types of modelling scenarios, however, it might be somewhat difficult for beginners who lack either the statistical background, computational background, and/or domain background to easily digest each example model. As we are learning Stan, we thought it helpful to create a Bayesian workflow for each example model in the manual… Continue Reading
Penetrating machine learning’s black box
“Despite widespread adoption, machine learning models remain mostly black boxes. Understanding the reasons behind predictions is, however, quite important in assessing trust, which is fundamental if one plans to take action based on a prediction, or when choosing whether to… Continue Reading
Betancourt: Insights into prior distributions
Michael Betancourt – Github Repo Getting a prior distribution to mimic your beliefs is not always that easy. Michael Betancourt addresses two big isuses: 1) Weakly infomative priors for principled regularization 2) Mixture models to integrate multiple data generating processes.… Continue Reading
Wraparound Contrail Plots for Time Series Visualization – Part 1
Using ggplot and R to Create Wraparound Contrail Plots for Time Series Visualziation To get started, let’s load the forecast package (Hyndman and Khandakar 2008) along with some additional datasets and tools for data manipulation and visualization: library(fpp) ##datasets that… Continue Reading