Very interesting talk by @mendelrandom.bsky.social on the apparent effect of shingles vaccines on dementia. Clear discontinuity from shingles vaccines on shingles, but not on dementia, in this much larger follow up in England, using similar analytic choices as the Wales study that showed a benefit.

Building the smoothbp R package, I had an intuition about what causes funnel pathology in hierarchical models. I was wrong. But chasing that intuition led somewhere more fundamental to the centring vs non-centring decision than I had hoped. New paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.19655

arXiv📈🤖 smoothbp: Fast Bayesian Hierarchical Piecewise Regression with Smoothed Transitions and Spike-and-Slab Model Selection By Bindoff

🎉 excited to share: the preprint for smoothbp is now live on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2606.19044 and v0.1.7 is on its way to CRAN. The package implements smoothed hierarchical breakpoint with spike'n'slab detection for longitudinal Bayesian models. Feedback welcomed. #rstats #bayesian #statistics

Fantastic short article on how to understand uncertainty, apparent contradiction, and consensus in science

There's a classic story of Hilbert attending one of Von Neumann's lectures on Hilbert spaces, and Hilbert raising his hand at the end to ask "what is a Hilbert space?" - very relatable as I review my own work on fiber bundle connections in hierarchical models

Is anyone in my network an endorser for STAT.CO on arxiv.org? My co-authors typically submit elsewhere so I'm drawing a blank here #Rstats #Bayesian

smoothbp is now on CRAN! Fit hierarchical piecewise regression models with smoothed change-points, spike-and-slab regularisation, and a Rust-powered sampler — so it's fast. Great for data with structural breaks you want to localise without hard discontinuities (i.e differentiable) #rstats #CRAN

smoothbp has been submitted to CRAN! Hierarchical piecewise regression with smoothed change-points in #RStats - multi-breakpoint models, spike-and-slab regularisation for automatic breakpoint selection, and a fast MCMC sampler written in Rust under the hood. #rstats #statistics #bayesian

Is anyone here a member of fosstodon.org and can send me an invite link? I miss the old twitter back when my feed was all statistics and science

If you're using agentic workflows (e.g. Claude) and value reproducibility and transparency, check out github.com/ABindoff/rep... - an MCP server that brings reproducibility logging to AI-assisted scientific computing

Ladies Cottage, Willow Court, Brigita Ozolins exhibition

Imagine mistakenly drinking cyanide laced Flavor-Aid, thinking it was cyanide laced Kool-Aid? They must have felt so silly when they realized they had been tricked into drinking Flavor-Aid!

Another day, another study using Shapiro-Wilk to assess "normality of data", and not reporting those results (which was fine, because the outcome was dichotomized anyway, because of course it was...)

We're all well aware that "correlation does not imply causation" but few heed this warning when it comes to ratios; indeed you can find them uncritically thrown about almost everywhere

The vibe coding apps are marketing to me so hard rn. The thing is, I have to methodically specify what I need whether I write the functions or AI does it and happily I do that best by ...writing code.

I appreciate that it's staggeringly brazen, but do we think Bondi erred when she claimed to have the Epstein list then later denied it exists? I think this administration is very comfortable with protecting power structures (beyond govt) that they are a part of, and want you to know you don't matter

If you have zero education, this will sound like good advice

So it turns out that compared to centralized distribution of digital information on the web, printed material in libraries provided a kind of distributed defense against the casual whims of an authoritarian government aiming to rewrite history.

AI is an arms race for the world superpowers, and it's certainly not a competition to see who can come up with the best chatbot (like some commenters seem to think)

Spent a big chunk of the holidays on farm projects including restoring the old hut that stands sentinel at the front of my property