SparseNUTS: Preconditioning hierarchical models in HMC with a sparse “Laplace approximation” at the marginal mode
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/12/s...
12.03.2026 21:21
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SparseNUTS: Preconditioning hierarchical models in HMC with a sparse “Laplace approximation” at the marginal mode
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/12/s...
Very cool example of spatial GAMs by @drxeo.eu on bsky (not bridged, as far as I can tell):
https://dominicroye.github.io/blog/canary-gam-downscaling/
#gam #statistics #rstats #rspatial
Interactive resources With the power of OJS and Quarto, I’ve created a few interactive websites to illustrate trickier statistical concepts when teaching. Check them out (and adapt and copy as much as you want!) With links to three different websites (accessible at the main link in the post)
Finally got around to adding fancy links to my different interactive teaching websites for showing things like p-hacking, p-value interpretations, and (still-in-draft-form) DAGs at www.andrewheiss.com/teaching/ #rstats #QuartoPub #statsky
Love this South Jersey accent deep dive. A great watch... after you're done your homework. Thanks, @evanedinger.bsky.social
🔥 StanCon 2026 third keynote announced 🔥
Kaitlyn Johnson,
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
More information here
discourse.mc-stan.org/t/announcing...
@mc-stan.org
New review of Group B strep from the NEJM…
www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.... #IDSky
New research article
Serotype-specific pneumococcal invasiveness: a global meta-analysis of paired estimates of disease incidence and carriage prevalence
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
#IDSky #ClinMicro #Streptococcus #IPD #OpenAccess #OA
Diffusion models & flow matching are reshaping simulation-based inference.
Thus, we wrote the first tutorial review on diffusion-based SBI. For an overview or a deep dive, check it out and let us know what you think:
arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2512.20685
Web: bayesflow-org.github.io/diffusion-ex...
I had a great time talking at the Juniper seminar series last week about composable infectious disease models. Some very good discussion after the talk. The recording is now up!
youtu.be/FQYOqGnbJWA?...
The fifth annual Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition is open!
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/02/11/t...
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!
bluesky-map.theo.io
I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
StanCon 20206 International Conferene on Bayesian Inference and Probabilistic Programming 17-21 August, 2026 Uppsala, Sweden
Three weeks time to submit contributed talk abstract to StanCon 2026! You can also submit a poster abstract early, if you need to make early travel plans. There will be travel and accommodation support for students, too!
More information about submitting at www.stancon2026.org/abstracts/
Fintan O’Toole @fotoole.bsky.social on the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti https://go.nybooks.com/4bmNB4F
Watched #Saboteur last night -- #Hitchcock captured the internal battle between democracy and fascism in 1942. A reminder that American fascists were fighting against democracy even during WW2: youtu.be/-rtlkILRmEQ
from what I can see, the video shows a beating followed by an execution.
StanCon 2026 tutorial and workshop deadlines in one week:
discourse.mc-stan.org/t/stancon-20...
@mc-stan.org
When works become public domain, anyone can reimagine and reuse them.
🚂 The Little Engine That Could can be freely reinterpreted—like this video marrying pages of the 1930 book to a Librivox audio recording. 📚+🎤
Learn more ⤵️
blog.archive.org/2026/01/01/w...
#PublicDomainDay
And we're live, Lecture A1 is online. Introduction to Bayesian workflow, generative models, estimands, estimators, estimates, error checking, beginnings of probability theory and Bayesian updating. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbY...
Great overview of current knowledge.
Many patient factors impact the management of people w/ presumed infectious diarrhea. Therefore, multispecialty engagement optimizes access, linkage to care, and judicious use of diagnostics and therapeutics…
academic.oup.com/cid/article/... #IDSky
Incremental development and testing: Black cat adoptions Even when we know the final statistical model that we want to use for inference, we should not try to write it directly. It is better to develop simpler, incremental models and test each with synthetic data. This helps us to avoid the frustration of trying to debug a complex model. Large models can and usually do fail in multiple ways, due to a poison salad\subjindex{poison salad} of coding errors, misspecification, and estimation challenges. % Being smart means working smart. By starting with a simple, minimal model and adding one feature at a time, we have a better chance of knowing which portion of the model code is responsible for an error, misspecification, or poor convergence. This case study builds the target statistical model in several steps, while using synthetic data simulation to help construct and test each incremental model. This helps us construct the model, notice and evaluate alternative implementations, and better understand how the model performs. This case study also provides an example of survival analysis with censoring. This kind of problem is commonplace---there are observations that are only partially observed, and we need to use all the information, even if only partial. Bayesian implementation provides two different ways to implement censored observations, by using cumulative distributions corresponding to the ordinary data model or by treating each censored value as partially observed and imputing it using the data model. Neither approach is always superior, and each helps us understand the model better. We'll show you both. Another benefit of this kind of example is the generative model of the sample and the statistical model necessarily differ. We often say Bayesian models are generative, they can be used to simulate observations. And that's true. But it isn't always true of every aspect of the model. In the case of censored values, the censoring is part of the observation m…
Prior predictive distribution of waiting times for the first adoption model (without censoring). Each curve is a survival plot for an individual prior simulation. Black curves correspond to black cats. Orange curves correspond to all other cat colors.
Posterior predictive distributions of waiting times for the first adoption model (without censoring). Each curve is a survival plot for an individual posterior simulation. Black curves correspond to black cats. Orange curves correspond to all other cat colors.
Including the old black cat adoptions survival analysis example as a case study in the forthcoming Bayesian Workflow book. This is presented as a whole incremental workflow with simulation, validation, and model comparison. Just now went through code and extra-commented and cleaned. Getting close!
We're doing the final sprint, and I think we're able to send the PDF of the forthcoming Bayesian Workflow book to the publisher in the next two weeks (500+ pages), which would mean it would be published some time next year
American food safety could be headed for a breakdown. Story by @sarah-todd.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/12/22/a...
Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.
I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students.
I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
Perspective "The net effect would be to disadvantage the people the FDA exists to protect, including millions of Americans at high risk from serious infections." "A Threat to Evidence-Based Vaccine Policy and Public Health Security at the FDA" by R.M. Califf et al.
Twelve former commissioners of the FDA express concern that the agency’s recent moves will undermine a regulatory model designed to ensure vaccine safety, effectiveness, and availability. Read the full Perspective: nej.md/48Ova76
"Validate With Simulated Truth: A first habit is to test whether an analytical pipeline can recover known conditions."
Very good advice below. So much COVID nonsense (e.g. 'immunological dark matter') basically came down to a non-identifiable model that hadn't been properly tested.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa has big slug energy. #IDsky #MicroSky
A study of COVID therapeutics in immunocompromised individuals on B-cell depleting therapy!!!
Nirmatrelvir/ritonavir significantly more effective than no rx (HR 0.56) molnupiravir w non significant trend to improved outcomes (HR also 0.56)… #IDSky #covid
academic.oup.com/cid/advance-...
I am fascinated by how viruses evolve - and not just since #SARSCoV2 has shown us at the global stage how consequential virus evolution can be for us.
In my new story in @science.org I got to explore how researchers are probing deeper into the past with old RNA virus genome.
So a 🧪 thread…
