Welcome to my blog

I mainly post about data analysis and applied statistics stuff, usually in R. Frequent topics include Bayesian statistics, causal inference, multilevel models, and statistical power.

Written by A. Solomon Kurz

Example power analysis report, II

In an earlier post, I gave an example of what a power analysis report could look like for a multilevel model. At my day job, I was recently asked for a rush-job power analysis that required a multilevel model of a different kind and it seemed like a good opportunity to share another example.

By A. Solomon Kurz

March 5, 2022

Notes on the Bayesian cumulative probit

In this post, I have reformatted my personal notes into something of a tutorial on the Bayesian cumulative probit model. Using a single psychometric data set, we explore a variety of models, starting with the simplest single-level thresholds-only model and ending with a conditional multilevel distributional model.

By A. Solomon Kurz

December 29, 2021

Use emmeans() to include 95% CIs around your lme4-based fitted lines

You’re an R user and just fit a nice multilevel model to some grouped data and you’d like to showcase the results in a plot. In your plots, it would be ideal to express the model uncertainty with 95% interval bands. If you’re a frequentist and like using the popular lme4 package, you might be surprised how difficult it is to get those 95% intervals. I recently stumbled upon a solution with the emmeans package, and the purpose of this blog post is to show you how it works.

By A. Solomon Kurz

December 16, 2021

Conditional logistic models with brms: Rough draft.

After tremendous help from Henrik Singmann and Mattan Ben-Shachar, I finally have two (!) workflows for conditional logistic models with brms. These workflows are on track to make it into the next update of my ebook translation of Kruschke’s text. But these models are new to me and I’m not entirely confident I’ve walked them out properly. The goal of this blog post is to present a draft of my workflow, which will eventually make it’s way into Chapter 22 of the ebook.

By A. Solomon Kurz

November 17, 2021

If you fit a model with multiply imputed data, you can still plot the line.

If you’re an R user and like multiple imputation for missing data, you probably know all about the mice package. The bummer is there are no built-in ways to plot the fitted lines from models fit from multiply-imputed data using van Buuren’s mice-oriented workflow. However, there is a way to plot your fitted lines by hand and in this blog post I’ll show you how.

By A. Solomon Kurz

October 21, 2021

Sexy up your logistic regression model with logit dotplots

The major shortcoming in typical logistic regression line plots is they usually don’t show the data due to overplottong across the y-axis. Happily, new developments with Matthew Kay’s ggdist package make it easy to show your data when you plot your logistic regression curves. In this post I’ll show you how.

By A. Solomon Kurz

September 22, 2021

One-step Bayesian imputation when you have dropout in your RCT

Say you have 2-timepoint RCT, where participants received either treatment or control. Even in the best of scenarios, you’ll probably have some dropout in those post-treatment data. To get the full benefit of your data, you can use one-step Bayesian imputation when you compute your effect sizes. In this post, I’ll show you how.

By A. Solomon Kurz

July 27, 2021

Got overdispersion? Try observation-level random effects with the Poisson-lognormal mixture

It turns out that you can use random effects on cross-sectional count data. Yes, that’s right. Each count gets its own random effect. Some people call this observation-level random effects and it can be a tricky way to handle overdispersion. The purpose of this post is to show how to do this and to try to make sense of what it even means.

By A. Solomon Kurz

July 12, 2021

Example power analysis report

If you plan to analyze your data with anything more complicated than a t-test, the power analysis phase gets tricky. I’m willing to bet that most applied researchers have never done a power analysis for a multilevel model and probably have never seen what one might look like, either. The purpose of this post is to give a real-world example of just such an analysis.

By A. Solomon Kurz

July 2, 2021