Fun example of "confusing" correlation with causation. … [Read more...]
R Consortium
The R Consortium has just been announced - with Microsoft as a founding Platinum member. Google, HP and Oracle are Silver members. According to their website, the consortium is a group of businesses organized under an open source governance and foundation model to provide support to the R community, the R Foundation and groups and individuals, using, maintaining and distributing R … [Read more...]
R on Spark
The upcoming Apache Spark 1.4 release will include SparkR---an R package that will allow big data (Spark) analyses to be run from the R shell. Computations in SparkR will be comparable to those that use the native Scala language. Future developments are to include machine learning support. … [Read more...]
UK general election predictions
FiveThirtyEight is publishing forecasts for the 2015 UK general election. The site was founded by Nate Silver who made a name for himself creating models that were successful in forecasting the results of recent US elections. Current predictions are for even closer parity between the Conservatives and Labour, with the SNP comfortably in third place (but not fully in control of the balance of … [Read more...]
Politicians and statistics
An article in today's Guardian claims that 220 potential MPs have pledged to attend a workshop on how to interpret statistics in public life. Makes a lot of sense. Politicians' misunderstanding of statistics is illustrated by reference to a test conducted by the Royal Statistical Society, reported (article has since been updated) as: ...97 MPs were asked the maths question: "If you spin a … [Read more...]