Archive for the ‘Statistics’ Category
The Presidential Election
Politics on a weblog is like picking up a stick of old, wet dynamite. You might grab it and absolutely nothing happens, or it might very well explode in your face. It is for this reason that I try to avoid political discussion on prefrontal.org. Every weblog must have a focus, and there are more [...]
Quote of the Week - Tukey
“The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.” - John W. Tukey, 1986
Quote of the Week - Fisher
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, [...]
Principal Components of Individual Differences
I have been spending the last few weeks exploring principal components analysis (PCA) of functional imaging data. PCA has been around for over a century, having first been invented by Karl Pearson in 1901. I have always been taught that PCA was a powerful data reduction technique, allowing a handful of components to [...]
Statistical Laws
I was clearing out some old files in my office this weekend when I came across a collection of notes from my early years in grad school. One set was from a graduate statistics course taught by my current advisor, George Wolford. On the last day of the course his goal was to [...]