Category Archives: Statistics

PMean: Getting R to shut the heck up

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When you are using R Markdown to create various documents, you are often interested in displaying any informative messages that appear along the way. This is especially true for documents you plan to use yourself. But when you are preparing a report or a presentation for someone else, you may want to suppress these messages. That’s not always easy because different functions in R use different means to display messages, especially warning messages. So the option that might suppress a warning message from one function might not work for another function. Warnings when loading packages are notoriously difficult to suppress. I want to list, for my own benefit, all of the options that are available for getting R to shut the heck up. Continue reading →

PMean: What to do about claims of borderline statistical significance

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A comment about the phrase “trend towards efficiency” on the Statistical Consulting Section discussion board raised a lot of interesting commentary. The phrase refers to a setting where the p-value is not small enough to allow you to claim statistical significance, but still was close enough to 0.05 to be worth commenting on. Most of responses were fairly negative and stressed that we need to refuse to sign off on any report of publication using that phrase. I posted a response that differed from the others. Here’s the gist of what I said. Continue reading →

PMean: Super Pi, a group to teach cluster computing using the Raspberry Pi

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If you want to learn cluster computing and you didn’t have easy access, you had two choices. You could simulate a cluster computer on your laptop, or you could buy time in the cloud. There’s a third approach, build your own cluster computer system using several Raspberry Pi computers. Continue reading →