Non-blind data collection leads to more frequent and possibly spurious "significant" results12/17/2016
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From Andrew Gelman, some "important methods and concepts related to statistics that are not as well known as they should be."
I was looking into the use of Stan for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. On page 23 of the Stan reference (stan-reference-2.9.0.pdf), I found this excellent and brief summary of HMC: HMC accelerates both convergence to the stationary distribution and subsequent parameter exploration by using the gradient of the log probability function. The un- known quantity vector θ is interpreted as the position of a fictional particle. Each iteration generates a random momentum and simulates the path of the particle with potential energy determined [by] the (negative) log probability function. Hamilton’s decom- position shows that the gradient of this potential determines change in momentum and the momentum determines the change in position. These continuous changes over time are approximated using the leapfrog algorithm, which breaks the time into discrete steps which are easily simulated. A Metropolis reject step is then applied to correct for any simulation error and ensure detailed balance of the resulting Markov chain transitions (Metropolis et al., 1953; Hastings, 1970). Immediately after that, the tuning parameters are discussed: Basic Euclidean Hamiltonian Monte Carlo involves three “tuning” parameters to which its behavior is quite sensitive. Stan’s samplers allow these parameters to be set by hand or set automatically without user intervention. In the beginning, a compiler was responsible for turning a high-level language (defined as higher level than assembler) into object code (machine instructions), which would then be linked (by a linker) into an executable.
At one point in the evolution of languages, compilers would compile a high-level language into pseudo-code, which would then be interpreted (by an interpreter) to run your program. This eliminated the object code and executables, and allowed these languages to be portable to multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. Pascal (which compiled to P-Code) was one of the first; Java and C# are more recent examples. Eventually the term P-Code was replaced with bytecode, since most of the pseudo-operations are a byte long. A Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler is a feature of the run-time interpreter, that instead of interpreting bytecode every time a method is invoked, will compile the bytecode into the machine code instructions of the running machine, and then invoke this object code instead. Ideally the efficiency of running object code will overcome the inefficiency of recompiling the program every time it runs. |
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AboutThis blog is mainly for statistics, R, or Duke-related stuff that is not directly relating to research activity. |