Statistics¶

Yes, statistics in general.

Another of the areas that has surprisingly turned out to be utterly central to my life 8 years after I finished studying it. The science of inference from imperfect data is not like people say riding a bike is, you know, with the never forgetting and such.

Using my stats skills again is more like my actual experience of getting back into riding bikes after a couple of years’ break than the cliché, in that I rarely ended up where I mean to be, that despite being depressingly slow I have somehow still forgotten how to stop, in that my dignity is in constant peril, and most of all with respect to the aches in places I had forgotten could hurt.

Things I am peering at to fertilise the fallow soil of my probabilistic reasoning:

• Larry Wasserman’s stats course
• Shalizi’s World’s simplest ergodic theorem
• and his regression lectures
• a list of statistics blogs which the data mining fad maketh so hot at this moment.
• Efficient MCMC in python
• Soothing: How to think about instrumental variables when you get confused
• some Bayesian fun for economics

See also: :ref:Stationarity.