# Naïve Numerical Sums in R

## Introduction

The Kolmogorov distribution (which I call $F(x)$) is as follows:

$F(x) = \frac{\sqrt{2 \pi}}{x} \sum_{k = 1}^{\infty} e^{-(2k - 1)^2 \pi^2/(8x^2)}$

# Materials for Teaching Applied Statistics

Today is the first day of the new academic year at the University of Utah. This semester I am teaching MATH 3070: Applied Statistics I, the fourth time I’ve taught this course.

# Evaluating Olive McBride with the Arkham Horror LCG Chaos Bag Simulator in R

(If you care, there may be spoilers in this post.)

## Introduction

I love Arkham Horror; The Card Game. I love it more than I really should; it’s ridiculously fun. It’s a cooperative card game where you build a deck representing a character in the Cthulhu mythos universe, and with that deck you play scenarios in a narrative campaign1 where you grapple with the horrors of the mythos. Your actions in (and between) scenarios have repercussions for how the campaign plays out, changing the story, and you use experience points accumulated in the scenarios to upgrade your deck with better cards.

# Time to Accept It: publishing in the Journal of Statistical Software

I’m reblogging this article mostly for myself. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll see that recently I published an article on organizing R code that mentioned using packages to organize that code. One of the advantages of doing so is that the work you’ve done is easily distributed. If the methods are novel in some way, you may even get a paper in J. Stat. Soft. or the R Journal that helps people learn how to use your software and exposes the methodology to a wider audience. Therefore we should know something about those journals. (I recently got a good reply on Reddit about the difference between these journals.)

When I was considering submitting my paper on psd to J. Stat. Soft. (JSS), I kept noticing that the time from “Submitted” to “Accepted” was nearly two years in many cases.  I ultimately decided that was much too long of a review process, no matter what the impact factor might be (and in two years time, would I even care?).  Tonight I had the sudden urge to put together a dataset of times to publication.

Fortunately the JSS website is structured such that it only took a few minutes playing with XML scraping (*shudder*) to write the (R) code to reproduce the full dataset.  I then ran a changepoint (published in JSS!) analysis to see when shifts in mean time have occurred.  Here are the results:

Top: The number of days for a paper to go from ‘Submitted’ to ‘Accepted’ as a function of the cumulative issue index (each paper is an “issue”…

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# How Should I Organize My R Research Projects?

My formal training in computer programming consists of two R programming labs required by my first statistics classes, and some JavaScript and database training. That’s about it. Most of my programming knowledge is self-taught.1 For a researcher who does a lot of programming but doesn’t consider programming to be the job, that’s fine… up to a point.

# R Function for Simulating Gaussian Processes

This semester my studies all involve one key mathematical object: Gaussian processes. I’m taking a course on stochastic processes (which will talk about Wiener processes, a type of Gaussian process and arguably the most common) and mathematical finance, which involves stochastic differential equations (SDEs) used for derivative pricing, including in the Black-Scholes-Merton equation. Then I’m involved in a Gaussian process and stochastic calculus reading group. So these processes will take up a lot of my attention.