christopheraden

9 ms·

31.
by christopheraden 12y ago
The key thing to note is that the parameter being estimated is a fixed (but unknown) quantity. Unlike in Bayesian inference, where we assume the parameter (or our belief in it) is random. The distinction is important. We want inference abou
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by christopheraden 12y ago
I've been with Anthem since going back to the UC system. Is there any way to check if I'm affected by the breach? University of California has not made an official statement regarding the breach whatsoever. I'm looking for so
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by christopheraden 12y ago
I'd be interested. Any tool that checks correctness is one less thing I have to write before I begin my analyses.
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by christopheraden 12y ago
UC Davis student here. To be fair, ECS10 is not a class that CS majors usually take--it's primarily an elective, and taken by non-majors as a way of satisfying science and engineering general elective credit. The CS majors start with E
35.
Evidence Confirms That D-Wave Computers Are Truly Quantum(businessinsider.com)
1 points by christopheraden 12y ago|0 comments
36.
by christopheraden 12y ago
A lot of these "facts" seem like they came from a Quora article from several months ago. Even the wording is similar on some of these, including "If you ask someone a question and they only partially answer, just wait. If you
37.
by christopheraden 12y ago
There's some additional information you'd need to determine this. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I only have one feature, X. Pretend I extend it into two dimensions by simply replicating the feature. In two dimensions, (X,X) f
38.
by christopheraden 12y ago
Derivatives require continuity. It would be sufficient to simply look at which number of dimensions gave you the best cross-validated classification rate.
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by christopheraden 13y ago
I work in big insurance, too. How did you handle porting your legacy code into (R|Python)? We had tens of thousands of lines of SAS code from over the course of 10 years (macros, clinical programs, reporting functionality) of SAS programmin
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by christopheraden 13y ago
My first question was how CVS-Caremark, a publicly traded company would be allowed to do this, considering it would hurt their bottom line. I didn't think ethics were a reasonable excuse for knowingly hampering profits, unless they fel
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by christopheraden 13y ago
False dichotomy about Excel vs. DSLs like R. "90% of the world is using Excel and similar tools to analyze and visualize their data. [...] What’s the next step-up from the spreadsheet? Learning how to code. Learning stats. Leaving the
42.
by christopheraden 13y ago
Ph.D student in Stats here. That we can even sample the full posterior with so much data is interesting in and of itself. The method isn't particularly revolutionary, especially compared to a method Zaiyang Huang and Andy Gelman[1] cam
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by christopheraden 13y ago
If you're interested in experimental and noisy, you can't really beat Metal Machine Music. It's practically unlistenable ;).
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by christopheraden 13y ago
We're interested in the probability of a coin flip yielding heads before we flip any coins. Uniform is just a really common prior to choose in this situation for a few reasons: -It's a special case of the beta distribution, which
45.
EFF Sues Liberation Music for Forcing Larry Lessig Video Off YouTube(eff.org)
1 points by christopheraden 13y ago|0 comments
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by christopheraden 13y ago
As lp251 says, the determinant method is not a good idea. Checking the condition number of the covariance matrix of the LS estimates (X'X)^{-1} is the way R does it.
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by christopheraden 13y ago
As someone who did graduate work in Bayesian methods for a statistics master's degree, I take offense to saying machine learning is not a concern of statistics and data mining (but not really)! The hesitance towards Bayesian methods se
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by christopheraden 13y ago
I asked a similar question for R about a year ago, and saw an interesting way to do it, taking advantage of the math. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11623865/faster-modulo-or...
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by christopheraden 13y ago
It's not surprising, but still fascinating. This property isn't limited to humans and wolves and dolphins, either. Scientists at Cornell showed that parrotlets have unique "names" given by their parents. http:/&#x2
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by christopheraden 13y ago
I remember my mom telling me stories about Sun's glory days, and me thinking that it seemed sort of unbelievable that any workplace would be as wild as she described. Interesting to see a lot of the same sort of stories being told here
51.
by christopheraden 13y ago
I encourage you to peruse the Github page of the R celebrity Hadley Wickham. While trained as a statistician and employed as a professor of statistics at Rice, he writes quite a few R packages that deal with more traditional development rol
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by christopheraden 13y ago
To your last point, it depends on what role you currently serve to your company. If you're among statisticians, you make yourself valuable by knowing more about computer science and programming than the rest of the group. If you're amongst
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by christopheraden 13y ago
That's the one I was looking for. Thanks!
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by christopheraden 13y ago
I, for one, am glad that IEEE is making an effort to get people excited about a formal education in data science. My education was a disjoint combination of CS and Statistics (my degree is formally in statistics), with no union between the
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by christopheraden 13y ago
What makes computer science a "hard" engineering and statistics not a "hard" subject? I'd hesitate to call statistics an engineering discipline, granted, but I object to differentiating statistics from CS on the basis of the word "hard". I
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by christopheraden 13y ago
Couple comments: Anyone in statistics/probability has seen this quote multiple times: "All models are wrong, but some are useful." -George Box. We often don't know the underlying distribution of a particular process or our data, true, but t
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by christopheraden 13y ago
It depends a lot on what you do for work, I bet. I'm in sort of a similar situation as you--Windows at work, Linux at home, but I also have a mac. I run a pretty bare-bones setup on my Linux desktop (#!: an OS for those who got frustrated t
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by christopheraden 13y ago
Your first point is not just a property of the Gaussian, but of all distributions. It's the Second Axiom of Probability! Your method is incorrect as a method of normalization, but it seems we are in agreement that perhaps normalization itse
59.
by christopheraden 13y ago
Uniform's pretty much the go to distribution for stuff like that--or having a non-random piece and a small random component. That's how Pokemon determined Catch Rates[1]. The problem with a lot of these distributions is that while you may h
60.
by christopheraden 13y ago
To explain why is difficult in layman's terms except for a few cases (the binomial is the token example for classical CLT). For the majority of the people I had in the intro statistics courses I TA'ed for, this was enough explanation. In un

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