Erik Ringen

Postdoc position open in Zurich -- Prof. Martin Tomasik and I have a joint SNF project on interpretable neural network approaches for large scale, complex item / temporal structure, online learning / cognitive development data.

Please retweet.

tinyurl.com/PostdocGNNSNF

For the XL voice messagers in her life, my wife listens on 2x speed...

🚨NEWS: The House is set to vote Monday on H.R. 867, the “IGO Anti-Boycott Act,” which would punish Americans with fines of up to $1 million or prison terms up to 20 years for participating in boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements that are promoted by international governmental organizations (IGOs), such as the UN or EU. The bill, sponsored by pro-Israel lawmaker Rep. Mike Lawler, expands U.S. anti-boycott law to target voluntary, values-based political action by U.S. citizens. Its aim is to shield Israel from nonviolent international pressure campaigns such as BDS. Rights groups say the legislation criminalizes constitutionally protected political expression and is part of a broader push to suppress opposition to Israeli genocide, apartheid, and illegal settlement expansion, under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so simultaneously absurd and disturbing: the House will vote
Monday on a bill that would punish Americans for participating in boycotts of Israel with fines of up to $1 MILLION or prison terms up to TWENTY YEARS.

If you calculate marginal effects at the level of the ordinal response, then it shouldn't matter whether the effect is captured by the thresholds as opposed to a predictor tho, right?

Excited to share that I’ve started a new role as Principal Data Scientist with @pymc-labs.bsky.social. I’m working with and learning from an amazing group of people to do applied Bayesian modeling and advance open-source @pymc.io libraries.

Maybe this is the easiest way to understand it: you are never just adding more data with these analyses. More data implies a more complex model because it adds to the tree structure/history you are modelling. So you can end up with less precision when adding more data.

Very unsure if this is a similar phenomenon, but I have seen something like this happen when simulating from phylogenetic models, where power can depend on how "tippy vs branchy" the tree. But nobody has an estimand in PCMs so power per se isn't necessarily the right way to think about it

OK, here is a very rough draft of a tutorial for #Bayesian #SEM using #brms for #rstats. It needs work, polish, has a lot of questions in it, and I need to add a references section. But, I think a lot of folk will find this useful, so.... jebyrnes.github.io/bayesian_sem... (use issues for comments!)

Ah, I found what I was looking for! From Imai et al.'s "Unpacking the Black Box of Causality" (2011). This is coming from the angle of two experiments in which you identify A -> B and B -> C and why you cannot infer the average causal mediation effect from that.

my recommenders are bi-modal since becoming a parent

@solomonkurz.bsky.social's post is a much better introduction to OLREs, mine had a narrower aim of reminding ppl that trusting the default behavior of any stats software will burn you, even when the defaults are good.

Common marmosets use body posture as multi-functional signal to solicit, maintain, and modify social play Social play is a highly active social interaction, characterized by rapid exchanges of various behaviors with multiple partners. Many primates use bodily expressions during social play, yet the potent...

In @drjessieadriaense.bsky.social 's paper we use a mixture model. You could call it a partially-Hidden Marko Model, bc some states known exactly others inferred. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Technical supplement not online it looks like, but code here: github.com/ErikRingen/m...

Not yet. My context is seeking principled way to deal with the spaces between behavior. Often ambiguous whether the dead time between behaviors is a distinct "rest" state or instead just a short pause. Matters a lot for Markov models if A -> B or A -> Rest -> B.

And was humbled again recently implementing latent multi-state (competing hazards) models in Stan

Time-to-event analyses taught me more about statistics than any other modelling exercise.

UZH: PhD position in evolutionary anthropology and medicine The Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine (IEM) Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, led by Prof. Adrian Jaeggi, is inviting applications from prospe...

🚨 JOB ALERT!! We're looking for a PhD student to join our group! Are you interested in evolutionary medicine / anthropology? Already have a master's? Apply with your own project ideas! See link: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... #EvMed @bioanth.org @ehbea.bsky.social Please RT!

Our JSS article is out!

And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned.

www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

Expert-elicitation method for non-parametric joint priors using normalizing flows We propose an expert-elicitation method for learning non-parametric joint prior distributions using normalizing flows. Normalizing flows are a class of generative models that enable exact, single-step...

Prior specification is one of the hardest tasks in Bayesian modeling.

In our new paper, we (Florence Bockting, @stefanradev.bsky.social and me) develop a method for expert prior elicitation using generative neural networks and simulation-based learning.

arxiv.org/abs/2411.15826

Our updated EcoEvoRxiv preprint "Estimating (non)linear selection on reaction norms: A general framework for labile traits" is now live. Work done in collaboration with Yimen Araya-Ajoy, Niels Dingemanse, @ali--wilson.bsky.social, and David Westneat. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Conversely, the tools of “exploratory” data analysis lend more credibility and clarity to scientific claims than statistical testing ever could.

𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 0.6.1 for #Rstats is out!

It's an ultra simple, super flexible, and 0-dependency package to draw beautiful tables in HTML, LaTeX, Typst, Word, PDF, and PNG.

And for those who ❤️ documentation, 𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 ships with a billion pages of tutorials:

vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/

It me

The right way to do predictive checks with observation-level random effects – Erik J. Ringen, PhD

New blog post (and uh, new blog!)

If you use observation-level random effects (e.g., for over-dispersed counts), your predictive checks are probably wrong. Here's how to do it the right way in both #brms and #PyMC.

tl;dr: you need to sample new levels of the OLRE to avoid a false goodness-of-fit

This primer on between/within effects (using Mundlak device) is the paper I pull-up more often than any other during stats consultations. Better approaches exist (latent mean centering) but the explanations and figures here are top notch.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Teaching statistics to grad students this semester. Reading Freedman's anti-regression piece "Statistical Models and Shoe Leather" (paper brought to my attention by @edhagen.net) next week to calibrate expectations. Tag urself on his ordinal scale of pessimism.