Washington Irving
irvingwashington22.bsky.social
Washington Irving
@irvingwashington22.bsky.social
respect sampling variability
discovered this wonderful nugget perusing the ggridges help files:

geom_density_ridges arranges multiple density plots in a staggered fashion, as in the cover of the famous Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures
November 21, 2025 at 6:14 PM
totally unrelated, but the feeling of saying, "yeah, i can do that stats thing you're asking about" when you're not sure that you really can do it. but then it turns out that, yes, you really CAN. 🥰
November 20, 2025 at 8:36 PM
tensor product splines are super cool and i'm kind of in love.

that's it. that's the entire post.
November 20, 2025 at 8:32 PM
Should these be called ‘secretly informative’ priors?
The default prior for the intercept in both {rstanarm} and {brms} are very wide.

Counterintuitively - being on the logit scale, this is actually translates to a **strong** prior that p(y=1) is near 1 or near 0.

Always check your priors!

#rstats
November 18, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Item 7,543 in the never ending list of r functions I wish I had known about sooner.

Much cleaner syntax inside functions that fit models across multiple outcomes (which happens a lot in my work).

😍
reformulate()
November 17, 2025 at 1:15 PM
🥰🥰🥰

I’m not the only one!
how is it even possible that outlooks search function is this bad can I please just get emails that contain the matching string in chronological order you’re a trillion dollar company ?
November 14, 2025 at 4:11 PM
nice paper on partial least squares discriminant analysis &potential limitations.

lovely sentence from the conclusion section:
"The obvious conclusion from our experiments is that it is a terrible idea to use PLS-DA blindly with all data sets."

bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
So you think you can PLS-DA? - BMC Bioinformatics
Background Partial Least-Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) is a popular machine learning tool that is gaining increasing attention as a useful feature selector and classifier. In an effort to und...
bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com
November 13, 2025 at 4:33 PM
I was just in a coffee shop in a college town. At least half the laptops were open to ChatGPT windows. I mean, I know many people use LLMs as a replacement for google search. But omg, this feels…worrisome.
November 13, 2025 at 3:40 PM
I love when good things, like mgcv, get even better! #rstats
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
November 12, 2025 at 6:22 PM
Anybody familiar with the analytic method (‘win ratio’) used in this study? I’m interested in an objective, pro-con sorta discussion.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Hemodynamic Resuscitation Targeting Capillary Refill Time in Early Septic Shock
This randomized clinical trial examines whether a personalized hemodynamic resuscitation protocol targeting capillary refill time was more effective than usual care in patients with early septic shock...
jamanetwork.com
November 11, 2025 at 4:33 PM
Dear Apple engineers. Can you please stop setting ‘logit’ to autocorrect to legit, leftist, login, or really anything else? When I say logit, I mean logit!
November 9, 2025 at 6:15 PM
This also makes me (sadly) wonder if prior-hacking is the Bayesian equivalent of p-hacking?
one of the greatest joys of working with bayesian models is the flexibility associated with prior specification.

one of the greatest frustrations of working with bayesian models is the flexibility associated with prior specification.
#rstats #brms
November 8, 2025 at 5:09 PM
one of the greatest joys of working with bayesian models is the flexibility associated with prior specification.

one of the greatest frustrations of working with bayesian models is the flexibility associated with prior specification.
#rstats #brms
November 8, 2025 at 3:11 PM
November 7, 2025 at 7:35 PM
rmsb also appears to be the only Bayesian package that comes with a built-in nomogram feature which is 😍.
What you get for Bayes: direct inference, exact uncertainty intervals for differences in means from proportional odds ordinal logistic regression, …. #RStats #StatsSky
November 5, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Man, I’ve written some ugly code in the past. But this lumbering beast of regex i just vomited to filter thru 2500 rows of free text is an unholy masterpiece to behold. And no, I will not be sharing. #rstats
November 4, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Repost = endorsement.
Without an explicit SESOI, readers will apply implicit SESOIs (as happened here) and the discussion becomes unnecessarily confused. SESOIs have nothing to do with sample size, but "with large N, people suddenly become aware of the matter" (@dingdingpeng.the100.ci). Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
October 31, 2025 at 12:09 PM
I ❤️ science.
"Because science rejects claims to truth based on authority and depends on the criticism of established ideas, it is the enemy of autocracy. Because scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, it is the enemy of dogma. "
October 26, 2025 at 2:03 PM
almost invariably, i eventually wind up at hbiostat.org for thoughtful answers to most of my statistical questions.

this is a like an actual biostat goldmine that continuously grows more gold. sincere thank you to @f2harrell.bsky.social !
October 23, 2025 at 4:55 PM
@hadley.nz in case you’re taking suggestions for new #tidyverse verbs, may I suggest ‘yoink()’?

i don’t yet know what it does. But whatever that action is, I’d for sure use it *all the time!*

#rstats
October 22, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Ever discovered a new function in an r package and been like, man that’s so useful. It must be new or else I’ve had known about it?

I advise against looking up when it was added to said package, unless you’re looking for a blow to your #rstats self-esteem.
October 22, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Umm…this is amazing. 10/10, would recommend.
Can you predict when Lou Bega's greatest hit, Mambo No. 5, was released based on the names of all the women mentioned in the song?

Weirdly yes.

yawpr.substack.com/p/project-a-...

#databs #rstats
October 22, 2025 at 3:35 PM
It’s both pleasure and torture to struggle learning some new technique and the associated coding skills, even after a decade in the bio stat world. #rstats #brms
October 21, 2025 at 5:43 PM
looking for help changing the legend title on conditional_smooth plots of a t2 smooth from #brms.

i've tried all manner of "labs" arguments and can't get it right. i've searched SO and stan forums and there's lots on conditional_effects, but less on smooths. 🫠
October 21, 2025 at 2:20 PM
from the never ending list of resources i wish i had when i was learning a particular concept, here is a great blog post by @andrew.heiss.phd about beta regression, including a portion using #brms 🥰

www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2021/11...
A guide to modeling proportions with Bayesian beta and zero-inflated beta regression models | Andrew Heiss
Everything you ever wanted to know about beta regression! Use R and brms to correctly model proportion data, and learn all about the beta distribution along the way.
www.andrewheiss.com
October 17, 2025 at 12:09 PM