One mental challenge is decision-making with more than two options. To simplify the dilemma that your humble author is encountering, assume that it is on a long haul flight and you are asked by a...

I passed my thesis defense today. The capability of passing the defense per se appeared less exciting than I had imagined, in part because everyone passes the dissertation defense anyway. It is like the p-value...

I read a NYT graph article entitled Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters. Apart from beautiful visualizations, their graph comparison seems persuading to draw two conclusions:

In my previous blog post on hierarchical stacking, reader “Chaos” pointed to me Gavin Brown’s Ph.D. thesis on Negative Correlation (NC) Learning which had a good characterization of the importance of diversity to stacking or...

I get an interview feedback from a company. I initially thought my interviews went well but it turned out that the company had a different opinion. Generally, it would be silly for me to post...

The term online update here is referred to updating a statistical model after certain modeled outcome is observed. A concrete example is in election forecast: the state election result comes in sequence, and that is...

In a recent paper I wrote, I discussed a few open questions on ensemble methods: Both BMA and stacking are restricted to a linear mixture form, would it be beneficial to consider other aggregation forms...

Recently I have gone through a few industry job applications. Here is a few examples that manifest how amusing this procedure can become

Depends who you ask.

I was reading Peter Bühlmann’s statistical science article “Invariance, Causality and Robustness”. To be fair, he gave a short course in 2020 here in Columbia, but after reading this paper I guess I did not...

It comes a lot that we often summarize a continuous distribution (often, posterior distribution of parameter estimation or of predictions) by a point mass (or a sharpe spike) for (1) computation or memory cost, (2)...

Cramér–Rao lower bound I will not call myself a theoretic statistician but sometimes I still find mathematical statistics amusing especially when they have practical implications. To start this blog post, I will go from Cramér–Rao...

The likelihood principle is often phrase as an axiom in Bayesian statistics. My interpretation of the likelihood principle reads:

This comes a lot in Monte Carlo computation: we are only given finite draws but we want to compute extreme quantiles.