Look, no hands! Exploring data with your eyes

Can you imagine using a computer without a mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen? Why would we even need to do that? In this article, we will learn how virtual on-screen ‘lenses’ can be controlled using eye-tracking technology, to magnify and show additional details on charts. Using your eyes to control a computer has some unexpected challenges, …

Why you can’t accept the null hypothesis

In this post I'd like to describe an issue that is almost never addressed in statistics courses, but should be, because it causes a lot of mistaken inferences. It is an issue so pervasive that I routinely see papers published in refereed journals that make this mistake. So if you can't bother to read through the rest of …

How To Generate Any Probability Distribution, Part 2: The Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm

In an earlier post I discussed how to use inverse transform sampling to generate a sequence of random numbers following an arbitrary, known probability distribution. In a nutshell, it involves drawing a number x from the uniform distribution between 0 and 1, and returning CDF-1(x), where CDF is the cumulative distribution function corresponding to the probability …

Data Science vs Data Analysis vs Data Mining: What’s the Difference?

This is a question that I often get asked by people new to data science. Because these are subjective, evolving terms, this question will never have a definitive answer. However, I think of it like this:Data analysis is literally just the act of drawing an inference from some data. Something as simple as looking at …