andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1472 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: My C-oriented Stan collaborators have convinced me to use underscore (_) rather than dot (.) as much as possible in expressions in R. For example, I can name a variable n_years rather than n.years. This is fine. But I’m getting annoyed because I need to press the shift key every time I type the underscore. What do people do about this? I know that it’s easy enough to reassign keys (I could, for example, assign underscore to backslash, which I never use). I’m just wondering what C programmers actually do. Do they reassign the key or do they just get used to pressing Shift? P.S. In comments, Ben Hyde points to Google’s R style guide, which recommends that variable names use dots, not underscore or camel case, for variable names (for example, “avg.clicks” rather than “avg_Clicks” or “avgClicks”). I think they’re recommending this to be consistent with R coding conventions . I am switching to underscores in R variable names to be consistent with C. Otherwise we were run
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 My C-oriented Stan collaborators have convinced me to use underscore (_) rather than dot (. [sent-1, score-0.843]
2 For example, I can name a variable n_years rather than n. [sent-3, score-0.49]
3 But I’m getting annoyed because I need to press the shift key every time I type the underscore. [sent-6, score-0.44]
4 I know that it’s easy enough to reassign keys (I could, for example, assign underscore to backslash, which I never use). [sent-8, score-0.88]
5 I’m just wondering what C programmers actually do. [sent-9, score-0.167]
6 Do they reassign the key or do they just get used to pressing Shift? [sent-10, score-0.482]
7 In comments, Ben Hyde points to Google’s R style guide, which recommends that variable names use dots, not underscore or camel case, for variable names (for example, “avg. [sent-13, score-1.815]
8 I think they’re recommending this to be consistent with R coding conventions . [sent-15, score-0.461]
9 I am switching to underscores in R variable names to be consistent with C. [sent-16, score-1.162]
10 Otherwise we were running into difficulties because Stan, following C, does not allow dots in variable names. [sent-17, score-0.659]
11 I don’t want to have a variable that’s called sd. [sent-18, score-0.362]
12 We don’t want to be changing Stan’s rules (too much of a mess given that Stan is written in C++) so I have to change my R conventions. [sent-21, score-0.324]
13 Then once I switch to underscores for variables that go into Stan models, I’m inclined to be consistent and use underscores throughout. [sent-22, score-1.197]
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Introduction: Kevin Cartier writes: I’ve been happily using R for a number of years now and recently came across Stan. Looks big and powerful, so I’d like to pick an appropriate project and try it out. I wondered if you could point me to a link or document that goes into the motivation for this tool (aside from the Stan user doc)? What I’d like to understand is, at what point might you look at an emergent R project and advise, “You know, that thing you’re trying to do would be a whole lot easier/simpler/more straightforward to implement with Stan.” (or words to that effect). My reply: For my collaborators in political science, Stan has been most useful for models where the data set is not huge (e.g., we might have 10,000 data points or 50,000 data points but not 10 million) but where the model is somewhat complex (for example, a model with latent time series structure). The point is that the model has enough parameters and uncertainty that you’ll want to do full Bayes (rather than some sort
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Introduction: Someone passed on to a message from his university library announcing that the journal “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” is no longer free. Librarians have to decide what to do, so I thought I’d offer the following consumer guide: Wiley Computational Statistics journal Wikipedia Frequency 6 issues per year Continuously updated Includes articles from Wikipedia? Yes Yes Cites the Wikipedia sources it uses? No Yes Edited by recipient of ASA Founders Award? Yes No Articles are subject to rigorous review? No Yes Errors, when discovered, get fixed? No Yes Number of vertices in n-dimensional hypercube? 2n 2 n Easy access to Brady Bunch trivia? No Yes Cost (North America) $1400-$2800 $0 Cost (UK) £986-£1972 £0 Cost (Europe) €1213-€2426 €0 The choice seems pretty clear to me! It’s funny for the Wiley journal to start charging now
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