amarkos|gr|blog » Statistics

All others bring data

amarkos — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:49:20 +0000

Straight Statistics is a pressure group whose aim is to detect and expose the distortion and misuse of statistical information, and identify those responsible. It has been formed by a group of legislators, statisticians and journalists, chaired by the Labour peer Lord Lipsey.

Share this post:

Στατιστική: Απλές συμβουλές για τα media

amarkos — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:38:56 +0000

[via] Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Thanks to Piled Higher and Deeper.

Share this post:

Rated R for Language

amarkos — Sat, 02 May 2009 18:43:53 +0000

If you regularly deal with problems related to Statistics and you haven’t even heard about R, then you’ve definitely committed a data sin. The R language has become a de facto standard among data analysts and miners for the development of statistical software.

R has many advantages such as that it’s free as in freedom and that you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available (read the popular New York Times article). R has its own conference, useR!, which in 2009 will be held at Rennes, France.

I’m a regulaR user since 2006, when I first discovered the power of R thRough “the R Book” by Michael Crawley. I wrote some code for a recent paper and right now I’m working on my first R package. Unfortunately, R is not at all popular in Greece, where (almost) everyone uses SPSS or other commercial software. R is mainstream but I think it’s here to stay.

So, don’t be lazy, try R and see for yourself if it fits your needs.

Share this post:

A Tribute to the SVD

amarkos — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:06:06 +0000

It was a love at first sight. The Singular Value Decomposition-SVD came into my (research) life back in 2002 as a crucial step of a whole family of Multivariate Data Analysis methods, such as Correspondence Analysis, Principal Component Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling and other. Most of us take advantage of its nice geometric properties as a “black box”, since it’s an important factorization technique with a wide spectrum of applications in statistics and machine learning.

I was wondering how many research articles mention the term SVD in a time period from 1970 to 2008, so I did a series of searches in Google Scholar. SVD gains more and more attention (see Figure below), especially after 1990, with a boom during the 00s. However, I can’t explain the fall in 2008 (I bet it’s not statistically significant :p). How long can the SVD stand the competition of more efficient methods? Will see.

SVD Search Results in Google Scholar

[read more at Wikipedia]

Share this post:

2009 Conference Schedule

amarkos — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:38:33 +0000

Here’s a list of the 7 conferences I’m attending and/or participating as an author in 2009:

11th International Federation of Classification Societies 2009 Conference (IFCS 2009), March 13-18, Dresden Germany (Program).
5th IFIP Conference on
Artificial Intelligence Applications & Innovations, AIAI 2009, April 23-25, Thessaloniki (Program).
22nd Panhellenic Statistics Conference, Chania, Crete, Greece, ESI 2009, 22-26 April, Chania, Crete, Greece.
International Conference on e-Business
ICE-B 2009 – International Conference on e-Business, July 7-10, Milan, Italy.
5th Panhellenic Data Analysis Conference with International Participation, PCDA09, 10-12 September 2009, Rethymno, Crete, Greece.
4th Balkan Conference in Informatics, BCI 09, 17-19 September, Thessaloniki, Greece.
9th Hellenic European Research on Computer Mathematics & its Applications Conference, HERCMA 2009, September 24-26, Athens, Greece.

See you there!

Share this post: