It’s fascinating how cohorts of statisticians have parallel pockets of hyper-specific knowledge due to textbooks, like the collective familiarity with blue fiddler crab mating patterns, courtesy of Agresti. Palmer penguins, iris data, ect, any others I'm missing? #statssky #statistics #rstats

Well, it's official. #UNL Chancellor Bennett submitted his final proposal and it includes eliminating the #statistics department. budgetprocess.unl.edu/final-budget... Guess it's time to go look for jobs. Anyone looking for a couple of very talented #datavis researchers?

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments: One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

One thing I have noticed a lot in meta-analysis (thinking of those involving comparison of prognostic models) is that most focus on Embase and Medline, but no mention of Compendium (think IEEE) WoS or Scopus. Granted the sheer volume for data extraction would be astronomical.

Does anyone else automictically reach for the PDF symbol when opening a new article on a journal site? It just seems like I can read the them faster. #AcademicSky

It's a shame I didn't find this before Oct. 31st. And also a shame the term "Ghost-time bias" never caught on.

NEW PAPER: "Reporting guidelines for studies involving generative artificial intelligence applications: what do I use, and when?" --> www.nature.com/articles/s41... #HealthTech #ClinicalAI #MachineLearning #MedAI #AIinMedicine #TransparentAI #HealthInnovation #GenAI

Probably the papers I share the most often are @f2harrell.bsky.social 1996 on how to effectively develop multivariate models and @benvancalster.bsky.social 2019 paper on Calibration. Both extremely well written and informative. What are you most shared stats paper? #statistics #statssky #academicsky

I recently rederived the poisson pdf distribution from the binomial. Reminds me of @kareemcarr.bsky.social recent blog about memorization vs proof. No computer around and needed it for something. Certainly there are times where knowing something will be time saving then re-deriving it from scratch.

Can Game Theory Help Us with Causal Discovery? What's Your Guess? In this week's issue of Causal Python Weekly, expect a solid mix of history, fresh discoveries, and good teaching: 1/ #CausalSky #EconSky #StatSky #MLSky #EpiSky

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

I have hiked and led hikes up Mt Washington about 30 times now. Fall is definitely one of the most deceptively dangerous times of year to hike it and you need to be prepared for overnight and winter weather!

I went into the office recently and I realized that the depth of my answer to a question a generally related to my proximity to a whiteboard. Anyone else? #statistis #statssky

This reminds me of a Penn & Teller quote related to the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model, where in 1955, they showed 7 "riffles" were needed to fully randomize a deck of cards. Below is a fascinating extension by Rick Wicklin showing how my riffles are required to restore a deck to its initial order

Excellent app!

Robert Frost was certainly more familiar with iambic pentameter than he was with estimated parameters, but in 1942 he wrote a couplet that sounds very much like a poet's perception of a confidence interval: #statistics #statssky #academicsky

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Since efficiency is defined in terms of variance (the second moment) and typically used to assess the performance of estimators for the mean, would estimators of higher-order moments such as skewness or kurtosis require an efficiency criterion based on correspondingly higher moments? Are these used?

This paper’s been popping as “evidence” that you can’t do real #causalinference w/ obs data. To me it shows you need rigorous pre-specified design (in addition to the willingness to fold when your hypothesis is not possible to answer with the data at hand). #EpiSky, #CausalSky, #AcademicSky

TOMORROW! 📢 R Consortium webinar: J&J’s Hybrid SAS/R FDA Submission: What Worked and Why Most pharma teams live in a mixed world of SAS and R. Go inside a successful hybrid SAS/R FDA submission and see exactly how the team made it work! r-consortium.org/webinars/jnj... #rstats #pharma #sas

Would be curious is anyone has follow through with this suggestion from this excellent @significancemag.bsky.social article from August 2011 by Alan Karr and S Stanley Young rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

ggplot(data, aes(x,y)) + geom_jitter(velocity = units(17000, "mph")) help, my data is stuck in LEO #RStats #ggplot #dataviz

Here is a regular reminder of my deconstructR package, which offers self-destructing plots in R (gravity plot, black hole plot, ...). You'll find the sources here: github.com/brandmaier/d... No need to thank me. And here is a gravity plot attached. #rstats #academicsky #phdsky

My fav starter packs so far, a thread: stats: go.bsky.app/Ki7PjpS stats: go.bsky.app/7TBN5rX causal inference: go.bsky.app/FdemGAZ package devs: go.bsky.app/N1569Qh data peeps: go.bsky.app/8TdEfdK medical stats: go.bsky.app/ArqEz36 bioinformatics: go.bsky.app/Ha64Gmv r-ladies: go.bsky.app/Vgxwa2F

Great to see @significancemag.bsky.social on bsky.

We’ve discussed who owns the *means* of production, but what about the *skews* and *kurtosis* of production? 🤔

For anyone who has not read Stigler's wonderful paper on the Epic Story of Maximum Likelihood, I cannot recommend it enough. You will laugh, you might cry, and you will certainly walk away learning something new. #statssky #statistics www.mit.edu/~18.655/pape...

Still one of my favorite blog posts: simplystatistics.org/posts/2019-0... #datascience #StatsSky #statistics #Academics

I feel like plotting the histogram of the error, squared error and absolute error is so much more informative then viewing the MSE or the RMSE.

The first #rstats conference (Nor'EastR) I ever went too I sat next to three friendly strangers who opened my eyes to the wonderful R community. Those people were @jdlong.cerebralmastication.com Kirk Mettler and David Smith! Shame to see Revolution Analytics down!

Thinking about joint probability regions (like 0<y<x−1) and how we compute their probabilities via double integrals. In principle, Green’s theorem could turn that into a line integral around the boundary — so why don’t we ever do that? Loss of probabilistic meaning, or just unnecessary machinery?

I read and write, I explore and I question, I design and script and analyse, I interpret and communicate. I do this to train my mind in the hopes of one day generating new knowledge. New knowledge that might even be useful, and that no algorithm can yet be trained on.

#rstats #dataviz A "line-up" test has been proposed as a human significance test: Can an observer spot a difference that rejects a null hypothesis? Here's glyphs for 20 penguins, representing the main variables with visual features. There are THREE multivariate outliers here. CAN YOU FIND THEM?

Coming up next month, register now! R+AI 2025 - Nov 12-13 Keynote: Joe Cheng, CTO @ Posit Talk: “Keeping LLMs in Their Lane: Focused AI for Data Science and Research” Register now! rconsortium.github.io/RplusAI_webs... #rstats #AI #DataScience @posit.co @jcheng5.bsky.social

Just because an LLM can produce a report with various figures & charts doesn't mean it is good at statistics. Because good statistics is not about producing code. It's about deep knowledge of study design & conduct. In my opinion, 95% of all data science problems come from poor questions & design.

Got a 10 minute video for you. The dots really clicked for me after watching this. youtu.be/oIMFZf5dUFA?...

Oh look. X is strongly correlated with rank(X) #AxesOfEvil

This comment reminds me of an excellent post by @thosenerdygirls.bsky.social thosenerdygirls.substack.com/p/dont-get-f...

Y'all. I just got ChatGPT to do everything in R for this manuscript. I mean EVERYTHING. And it's all legit and reproducible. I'm shook. How are we mentoring our trainees in statistics now? Who needs to learn coding in R line by line, and who doesn't? scienceforeveryone.science/statistics-i...

Think of how much better off we'd be if every established researcher got in the habit of writing papers entitled "Second thoughts on [thing I'm famous for]"

Excellent piece by Miryam Naddaf discussing a surge in papers that likely use LLMs on open data. This is concerning since I work on one of those with some of these datasets (NHANES, CDC WONDERS, BRFSS). www.nature.com/articles/d41...

An 8 year-old blog post on causal thinking in epidemiology that I'm sharing for no particular reason (ICYMI). darrendahly.github.io/post/2017-02...

Excellent advice on paper review: 1. Peer reviewers are volunteers. 2. Map all comments to actions. 3. Address all comments. 4. Focus on improving your paper, instead of arguing. 5. Rarely, and only with strong defense, say no. 6. Don’t take things personally. 7. Avoid recreational revisions.

S-Values are much more interpretable than P-values, yet adoption seems near impossible. I wonder what it would take to make the leap? #statssky #episky #rstats #statistics

"Man, I really wish RStudio respected hierarchy in code-folded section headers... I wonder how easy it would be to..." (inner voice: DON'T DO IT! IT'S NOT WORTH IT! JUST GET BACK TO WORK! THE YAK IS BEST LEFT UNSHORN!) "... I'm gonna do it." #RStats #RStudio

We should do a study on how much of the funded applied research suffers from problems that the unfunded methods research could have helped prevent or resolve

my personal favorite seed set up i've is set.seed(666) # \m/ rock on #rstats #databs any others out there?

Yongxi Long and colleagues have written an excellent post about when and when not to worry about the proportional odds assumption: discourse.datamethods.org/t/when-and-w... #StatsSky #EpiSky #Statistics #RStats

"Uncooperative statistician": the term used (typically by a senior clinician) to describe a well-trained and knowledgeable statistician who refuses to conduct flawed or fraudulent research.