MCMC in Python: PyMC for Bayesian Probability

I’ve got an urge to write another introductory tutorial for the Python MCMC package PyMC.  This time, I say enough to the comfortable realm of Markov Chains for their own sake.  In this tutorial, I’ll test the waters of Bayesian probability.
Now, what better problem to stick my toe in than the one that inspired Reverend [...]

Google Flu

Have yinz already seen Google Flu? It’s a project by google.org, in collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s been getting healthy press coverage for the last two weeks or so. And, if you want to dig deeper, a draft manuscript on their approach is also available.
The headline [...]

Learning to Rank

A lovely stats paper appeared on the arxiv recently. Learning to rank with combinatorial Hodge theory, by Jiang, Lim, Yao, and Ye.
I admit it, the title is more than a little scary. But it may be the case that no more readable paper has so intimidating a title, and no more intimidatingly titled [...]

Grad Students: NSF Funding for Research Abroad

NSF recently began accepting applications for their annual EAPSI program (due date: Dec. 9). The “East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes” are an opportunity for science and tech grad students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents to do some research in an Asian or Pacific country of their choice.

MCMC in Python: PyMC to sample uniformly from a convex body

This post is a little tutorial on how to use PyMC to sample points uniformly at random from a convex body.  This computational challenge says: if you have a magic box which will tell you yes/no when you ask, “Is this point (in n-dimensions) in the convex set S”, can you come up with a [...]