I probably hadn’t thought about canonical correlation in twenty years, but then a problem came up this week where it was the exact technique I needed. What made me laugh, though, is the particular problem I was dealing with twenty years ago had school achievement measures – tests of English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies…
When I was in high school I had a very defined career path. I told anyone who asked me (which was very few people since no one cares what a high school kid thinks) that my career goal was to be president of General Motors. I even applied to the General Motors College. (Bet you…
A large part of my day is spent playing with new software and trying to break it. Yes, there are actually grown-ups who get paid to do this for a living. I find it hard to believe myself. The theory, which actually works well, is that whenever someone has a question about something he or…
I failed art in junior high school. When I tell people that, people who actually have artistic talent, they look at me in disbelief and say, “No one fails art. That’s one of the great things about art. How could you possibly fail art?” The answer is that I was very, very bad at it….
Being a professor can build humility. About twenty years ago, I was teaching the third course in the statistics sequence required of all graduate students. The second course had been taught by an adjunct professor, which was FAR less common then than it is now (that’s a whole different post). The first day I started…
Lately I have been on a roll looking at relatively less common statistical techniques, proportional hazards, survival analysis, etc. In keeping with that, I have been taking a look at propensity score matching, fondly known as PSM by, – well, by no one actually. The problem to be solved …. Think about some of these…
What is an event history model? Think of it like this – you are interested in whether something happens, what predicts whether it happens and how long until it happens. Let’s take a common one, like, say, death. An event history model could predict the duration from diagnosis of tuberculosis to death. In this model…
Over the past twenty-five years, due to improvements in statistical software capabilities, it has become increasingly easier to obtain output for complex statistical procedures. Unfortunately, this does not mean that statistical analysis has become easier. In a relatively short period, it is possible to train an employee or student to be competent at getting computers…
Here’s a clever idea — Let’s say you want to predict who dies within the next year (I bet you are a lot of fun at parties). Moreover, you have a hypothesis to test that married people are less likely to die than single people. There are a number of factors that relate to both…
When I read textbooks, whether in mathematics or other fields, these are usually as boring as watching a light bulb flicker. Searching the Internet for Algebra problems can get to be pretty depressing. (Whether someone who spends her spare time looking for Algebra problems might already have mental health issues is a separate question not…