📈 Registrations now open! Time Series Analysis & Forecasting in R 🗓 20–24 July| 🌍 Online A very hands-on course on dynamic GLMs/GAMs for ecological time series using {mvgam} & {brms}. Bayesian models, nonlinear effects, forecasting & live coding in R. www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...

Our first symposium of #TIBS2026 explores the exciting field of quantitative #Paleoecology. Discover how #data, #models, and innovative #methods are used to unlock and analyze the extensive ancient ecological record to address important scientific and practical questions.

Ok science hivemind 🧪. I have a distinct memory of an awesome graphic in a paper about how environmental filtering and biotic interactions determine whether an organism can live in any given place. Almost like multiple filter layers on top of another. Does anyone have a preferred graphic of this?

Interested in Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) and Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) in R? Don’t miss this chance to level up your skills! The course is nearly full — www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work... #SDM #ENM #RStats #Ecology #DataScience

If you mentor scientific writers, teach a course with written assignments, or anything similar, you know how much work is involved, and how difficult it can be to provide the guidance developing writers need. This book is for you! 2/2

Over the holiday, while folks were on well-deserved breaks, our new book was released! Mentoring writers is hard - we can make it easier for you. Please help spread the word - repost this, tell your colleagues, etc. scientistseessquirre... 1/2

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

We are recruiting several PhD students. If you are interested in conservation conflicts, population ecology, quantitative ecology, or biodiversity, check these projects out (links in the thread, feel free to reach out):

It's official - my new book is officially published today! If you mentor science students who write - grad or undergrad - you're the reason we wrote this. Mentoring/teaching writing is hard; but we can make it easier!

Here is a little piece about the day of my final Monkey Cage recording - a couple of weeks ago in beautiful #manchester www.bigissue.com/opinion/robi...

Goodbye, Monkey Cage - not as infinite as I imagined

Probably should have been made a month or more ago, but better late than never. Made my mum’s family Christmas cake recipe for the first time since moving to 🇩🇰

A mystery seed from a Breckland, eastern England ghostpingo core as found by @hayleymcmechan.bsky.social. help oh botanists!!! 1 mm scale @annasolcova.bsky.social @jo-the-botanist.bsky.social @bramblebotanist.bsky.social @timholtwilson.bsky.social

Huge thanks to @gsimpson.bsky.social and everyone who joined our GAMs in R course! 🚀 Happy modeling, everyone! 🎉

A palaeoecological plant find from a Breckland ghost ice age pond core (East Harling, E. England). Puzzled over by @hayleymcmechan.bsky.social & myself. Help with ID please team!! Seems obvious but stuck. @jo-the-botanist.bsky.social @bramblebotanist.bsky.social @timholtwilson.bsky.social

We have a preprint about modelling three-dimensional movement tracks, led by @njklappstein.bsky.social. The model takes the form of a step selection function and, just like in 2D, it can include directional persistence, attraction to targets, and habitat selection. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

If you want to see me get flustered, but recover to give a banger talk about RSV prophylaxis, the magic of GAMs, and the vital importance of survellence data, then this is the talk for you. With shout-outs for @gsimpson.bsky.social, @vincentab.bsky.social, and @hpscireland.bsky.social

A new release of the mgcv #RStats 📦 is out on CRAN and Simon Wood (U Edinburgh) has added some significant new features despite the small bump in version number: 🌟 scasm() for estimating GAMs with shape constrained smooths. Can be used with any family & smoothness selection is via the EFS method

Opinion: Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing. Buckling of commercial models alongside maturing of community-led efforts promises major shifts, says Caroline Edwards (@theblochian.bsky.social). www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...

filter_out() = yeet()

Just updated my manuscript on using #GAMs in #AnimalScience, now on arXiv: doi.org/10.48550/arX... 🐄🐖🪶 Extended examples now show how GAMs go beyond prediction, helping estimate biologically meaningful traits from data. Code: github.com/gavinsimpson... 🧪 #RStats #mgcv #Statistics #OpenScience

"I don't care for the UK tonight So stay Stay" Fuck you, Katie Lam, absolutely fuck off. www.youtube.com/watch?v=W38v...

I’m seeing some misinformation about pseudo-random number generator best practices going around the internets. Let’s talk about why the pseudo-random number generator seed you use shouldn’t actually have any impact on your results and, consequently, you can choose whatever seed you damn well please.

So Framework is supporting projects in the Linux ecosphere that are lead by vile, racist, homophonic, transphobic people and sees nothing wrong with that. And Shopify supports and platforms the racist idiot that built Ruby on Rails, all because their money stream is entirely dependent on Rails

Fuck Kramnik

The Pink Book of #MarginalEffects (aka Model to Meaning) ships next week and I've got a backlog of Zoolander memes. Hope you're hungry for some spam in your timeline. #RStats #PyData

The new {marginaleffects} release for #RStats (0.30.0) comes with two new vignettes: 1. Speed up computation with automatic differentiation (often 10x gains) marginaleffects.com/bonus/perfor... 2. Power analyses with {marginaleffects} and {DeclareDesign}. marginaleffects.com/bonus/power....

We're glad to finally bring you this update!

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

If you’d like to go beyond updates and truly master GAMs in R, join our online course with @gsimpson.bsky.social, 8–11 Dec. 📊 Learn how to fit, interpret, visualise, and communicate GAMs in practice, guided by one of the leading experts in the field. www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...

🚀 gratia 0.11.1 is out! Compatibility with ggplot2 4.0.0 + usability improvements + bug fixes. #Rstats #mgcv #gam #statistics

🚀 gratia 0.11.0 is out! Now has a paper in JOSS — please cite 📄 doi.org/10.21105/jos... Experimental parallel processing ⚡ New assemble() for building plots 🎨 Better support for complex families + new diagnostics 🧪 Lots of bug fixes + polish ✨ 👉 gavinsimpson.github.io/gratia/ #Rstats

A new visitor 🕷️ to our back yard garden 🪴 Not sure what it is yet, but for scale the abdomen is about as large as the end of a human male’s little finger

Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/

You WILLL NOT guess what this is about. But I encourage you to try before clicking through for the answer. www.reddit.com/r/AskNYC/s/X...

📢 Course alert! Generalised Additive Models (GAMs) in R with @gsimpson.bsky.social 📅 8–11 Dec (Online) Learn how to model complex relationships using GAMs, splines & more with mgcv and gratia. Details & registration 👉 www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work... #Rstats #DataScience #GAMs #Statistics

Packed house at Åben 🍻 for the second night of #PintOfScience in #Aarhus #Denmark 🧬 🧪 Tonight’s talks; 🎙️ Attack of the Clones - Andrew Ferenbach 🎙️ Is there a Serial Killer Gene? Victoria Twiddy

It is criminal that early career researchers like Bert are in such tenuous positions. Bert has and continues to do some exceptional work on statistical ecology. If you know of any relevant opportunities, details 👇

A few months until the end of my postdoc contract. Norway has defunded a good part of the academic system, so opportunities are limited. I will try to apply for my own funding, but pending potential failure, if someone has a job opportunity that might suit me I would be happy to have a chat!

...And used this helpful suggestion from @vincentab.bsky.social using the marginaleffects package (cited in the preprint) to estimated total hospitalizations averted across the whole season. bsky.app/profile/vinc...

The paper also makes use of the hierarchical GAMs outlined here by @ericjpedersen.bsky.social, David Miller, @gsimpson.bsky.social, @noamross.net (well, the simplest possible application of them anyway)... peerj.com/articles/6876/

That's quite a line break...

REPOSTS APPRECIATED ‼️ Please if you're a queer european person or simply a decent human being, sign his petition to help fight LGTB+phobia in EU. Trans people are being persecuted, it ends in a month and in less than a minute you can help people to not lose rights eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...

My brother and son are autistic and RFK Jr can go fuck himself, along with every single person who watches this and nods along.

When will they learn 🤬 www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

For what it's worth I wrote a bit of posterior simulation code gist.github.com/bbolker/a369... - this may mimic what's already done under the hood in some of @strengejacke.bsky.social's packages ...

What's a good way to compute a confidence interval for fitted (i.e. expected) values of response in a zero-altered gamma model (no ranefs) fitted in glmmTMB (with family = ziGamma(link = "log"))? @bbolker.bsky.social ? #RStats

New essay out in EOS: The Valuable, Vulnerable, Long Tail of Earth Science Databases. eos.org/opinions/the... These data resources are essential to Earth system research and have enormous costs of replacement. With Andrea Thomer, @sjgoring.bsky.social, & Jessica Blois

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

Bonus update! Choropleths are still visually distorted and overrepresent land, so we can instead use points that are sized by population. I added an example at the end to show one way to do this with {sf}'s magical st_centroid() #rstats www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02...