The beta distribution is highly flexible distribution and applies to many situations and environments. The beta distribution applies well when there are percentages. The upcoming New Jersey U.S. Senate election on Wednesday fits that criterion quite well. So here I applied the beta distribution to some pre-election polls where the numbers were obtained through the… Read More »
Rick Wicklin on the SAS blog made a post today on how to tell if a sequence of coin flips were random. I figured it was only fair to port the SAS IML code over to R. Just like Rick Wicklin did in his example this is the Wald-Wolfowitz test for randomness. I tried to… Read More »
I had someone ask me the other day how to take a scatterplot and draw something other than a straight line through the graph using Excel. Yes, it can be done in Excel and it’s really quite simple, but there are some limitations when using the stock Excel dialog screens. So it is probably in… Read More »
There are many kinds of intervals in statistics. To name a few of the common intervals: confidence intervals, prediction intervals, credible intervals, and tolerance intervals. Each are useful and serve their own purpose. I’ve been recently working on a couple of projects that involve making predictions from a regression model and I’ve been doing some… Read More »
Whenever I go to the grocery store it always seems to be a lesson in statistics. I go get the things I need to buy and then I try to select the checkout register that will decrease the amount of time I have to wait. Inevitably, I select the one line where there is some… Read More »
As it stands right now Cory Booker has a very good chance of winning the New Jersey Special U.S. Senate election on October 16 to replace Frank Lautenberg and fill the remainder of his term for the next 15 months. So with the election only about a month away I took advantage of some of… Read More »
I was listening to Science Friday from Sep 6th. and one of the discussions by Ira Flatow was on the well known Monty Hall Problem. This problem has been hashed out many times and in fact I was first introduced to the probability aspects of the problem while taking my introductory to statistics class when… Read More »
It is the eve of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary election. This is a simple follow-up on my post from last Friday as I was curious how the final pre-Election Day polling was going to fall. It’s fairly clear who is going to get the most votes. Though we have a very good… Read More »
The New York City mayoral Democratic primary election is taking place this coming Tuesday (Sep. 10th) and there are several candidates in the running. Bill de Blasio is the front runner and is expected to win. However, there is a catch. Even if he takes the plurality of the vote he may not actually win.… Read More »
The Beta distribution (and more generally the Dirichlet) are probably my favorite distributions. However, sometimes only limited information is available when trying set up the distribution. For example maybe you only know the lowest likely value, the highest likely value and the median, as a measure of center. That information is sufficient to construct a… Read More »