## Model Shop! One volume done!

Hooray, I have finally finished what used to be called EGADs and is now the first volume of The Model Shop. Calling it the first volume is, of course, a treacherous decision.

So. This is a book of 42 activities that connect geometry to functions through data. There are a lot of different ways to describe it, and in the course of finishing the book, the emotional roller-coaster took me from great pride in what a great idea this was to despair over how incredibly stupid I’ve been.

I’m obviously too close to the project.

For an idea of what drove some of the book, check out the posts on the “Chord Star.”

But you can also see the basic idea in the book cover. See the spiral made of triangles? Imagine measuring the hypotenuses of those triangles, and plotting the lengths as a function of “triangle number.” That’s the graph you see. What’s a good function for modeling that data?

If we’re experienced in these things, we say, oh, it’s exponential, and the base of the exponent is the square root of 2. But if we’re less experienced, there are a lot of connections to be made.

We might think it looks exponential, and use sliders to fit a curve (for example, in Desmos or Fathom. Here is a Desmos document with the data you can play with!) and discover that the base is close to 1.4. Why should it be 1.4? Maybe we notice that if we skip a triangle, the size seems to double. And that might lead us to think that 2 is involved, and gradually work it out that root 2 will help.

Or we might start geometrically, and reason about similar triangles. And from there gradually come to realize that the a/b = c/d trope we’ve used for years, in this situation, leads to an exponential function, which doesn’t look at all like setting up a proportion.

In either case, we get to make new connections about parts of math we’ve been learning about, and we get to see that (a) you can find functions that fit data and (b) often, there’s a good, underlying, understandable reason why that function is the one that works.

I will gradually enhance the pages on the eeps site to give more examples. And of course you can buy the book on Amazon! Just click the cover image above.

## The Index of Clumpiness, Part Three: One Dimension

In the last two posts, we talked about clumpiness in two-dimensional “star fields.”

• In the first, we discussed the problem in general and used a measure of clumpiness created by taking the mean of the distances from the stars to their nearest neighbors. The smaller this number, the clumpier the field.
• In the second, we divided the field up into bins (“cells”) and found the variance of the counts in the bins. The larger this number, the clumpier the field.

Both of these schemes worked, but the second seemed to work a little better, at least the way we had it set up.

We also saw that this was pretty complicated, and we didn’t even touch the details of how to compute these numbers. So this time we’ll look at a version of the same problem that’s easier to wrap our heads around, by reducing its dimension from 2 to 1.  This is often a good strategy for making things more understandable.

Where do we see one-dimensional clumpiness? Here’s an example:

One day, a few years ago, I had some time to kill at George Bush Intercontinental, IAH, the big Houston airport. If you’ve been to big airports, you know that the geometry of how to fit airplanes next to buildings often creates vast, sprawling concourses. In one part of IAH (I think in Terminal C) there’s a long, wide corridor connecting the rest of the airport to a hub with a slew of gates. But this corridor, many yards long, had no gates, no restaurants, no shoe-shine stands, no rest rooms. It was just a corridor. But it did have seats along the side, so I sat down to rest and people-watch.

## The Index of Clumpiness, Part Two

Last time, we discussed random and not-so-random star fields, and saw how we could use the mean of the minimum distances between stars as a measure of clumpiness. The smaller the mean minimum distance, the more clumpy.

What other measures could we use?

It turns out that the Professionals have some. I bet there are a lot of them, but the one I dimly remembered from my undergraduate days was the “index of clumpiness,” made popular—at least among astronomy students—by Neyman (that Neyman), Scott, and Shane in the mid-50s. They were studying Shane (& Wirtanen)’s catalog of galaxies and studying the galaxies’ clustering. We are simply asking, is there clustering? They went much further, and asked, how much clustering is there, and what are its characteristics?

They are the Big Dogs in this park, so we will take lessons from them. They began with a lovely idea: instead of looking at the galaxies (or stars) as individuals, divide up the sky into smaller regions, and count how many fall in each region.

## The Index of Clumpiness, Part One

There really is such a thing. Some background: The illustration shows a random collection of 1000 dots. Each coordinate (x and y) is a (pseudo-)random number in the range [0, 1) — multiplied by 300 to get a reasonable number of pixels.

The point is that we can all see patterns in it. Me, I see curves and channels and little clumps. If they were stars, I’d think the clumps were star clusters, gravitationally bound to each other.

But they’re not. They’re random. The patterns we see are self-deception. This is related to an activity many stats teachers have used, in which the students are to secretly record a set of 100 coin flips, in order, and also make up a set of 100 random coin flips. The teacher returns to the room and can instantly tell which is the real one and which is the fake. It’s a nice trick, but easy: students usually make the coin flips too uniform. There aren’t enough streaks. Real randomness tends to have things that look non-random.

Here is a snap from a classroom activity: Continue reading The Index of Clumpiness, Part One

## Capture/Recapture Part Two

Trying to get yesterday’s post out quickly, I touched only lightly on how to set up the various simulations. So consider them exercises for the intermediate-level simulation maker. I find it interesting how, right after a semester of teaching this stuff, I still have to stop and think how it needs to work. What am I varying? What distribution am I looking at? What does it represent?

Seeing how the two approaches fit together, yet are so different, helps illuminate why confidence intervals can be so tricky.

Anyway, I promised a Very Compelling Real-Life Application of This Technique. I had thought about talking to fisheries people, but even though capture/recapture somehow is nearly always introduced in a fish context, of course it doesn’t have to be. Here we go:

## Human Rights and Capture/Recapture

I’ve just recently been introduced to an outfit called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Can’t beat them for statistics that matter, and I really have to say, a lot of the explanations and writing on their site is excellent. If you’re looking for Post-AP ideas, as well as caveats about data for everyone, this is a great place to go.

One of the things they do is try to figure out how many people get killed in various trouble areas and in particular events. You get one estimate from some left-leaning NGO. You get another from the Catholics. Information is hard to get, and lists of the dead are incomplete. So it’s not surprising that different groups get different estimates. Whom do you believe?

## Capture/Recapture Part One

If you’ve been awake and paying attention to stats education, you must have come across capture/recapture and associated classroom activities.

The idea is that you catch 20 fish in a lake and tag them. The next day, you catch 25 fish and note that 5 are tagged. The question is, how many fish are in the lake? The canonical answer is 100: having 5 tagged in the 25 suggests that 1/5 of all fish are tagged; if 20 fish are tagged, then the total number must be 100. Right?

Sort of. After all, we’ve made a lot of assumptions, such as that the fish instantly and perfectly mix, and that when you fish you catch a random sample of the fish in the lake. Not likely. But even supposing that were true, there must be sampling variability: if there were 20 out of 100 tagged, and you catch 25, you will not always catch 5 tagged fish; and then, looking at it the twisted, Bayesian-smelling other way, if you did catch 5, there are lots of other plausible numbers of fish there might be in the lake.

Let’s do those simulations.

## Coming (Back) to Our Census

Reflecting on the continuing, unexpected, and frustrating malaise that is Math 102, Probability and Statistics, one of my ongoing problems has been the deterioration of Fathom. It shouldn’t matter that much that we can’t get Census data any more, but I find that I miss it a great deal; and I think that it was a big part of what made stats so engaging at Lick.

So I’ve tried to make it accessible in kinda the same way I did the NHANES data years ago.

This time we have Census data instead of health. At this page here, you specify what variables you want to download, then you see a 10-case preview of the data to see if it’s what you want, and then you can get up to 1000 cases. I’m drawing them from a 21,000 case extract from the 2013 American Community Survey, all from California. (There are a lot more cases in the file I downloaded; I just took the first 21,000 or so so we could get an idea what’s going on.)

## A Bayesian Example: Two coins, three heads.

As laid out (apparently not too effectively) here, I’m on a quest, not only finally to learn about Bayesian inference, but also to assess how teachable it is. Of course I knew the basic basics, but anything in stats is notoriously easy to get wrong, and hard to teach well. So you can think of this in two complementary ways:

• I’m trying to ground my understanding and explanations in basic principles rather than leaping to higher-falutin’ solutions, however elegant; and
• I’m watching my own wrestling with the issues, seeing where I might go off-track. You can think of this as trying to develop pedagogical content knowledge through introspection. Though that sounds pretty high-falutin’.

To that end, having looked critically at some examples of Bayesian inference from the first chapters of textbooks, I’m looking for a prototypical example I might use if I were teaching this stuff.  I liked the M&Ms example in the previous post, but here is one that’s simpler—yet one which we can still extend.

There are two coins. One is fair. The other is two-headed. You pick one at random and flip it. Of course, it comes up heads. What’s the probability that you picked the fair coin?

## The Search for a Great Bayesian Example

When we teach about the Pythagorean Theorem, we almost always, at some point, use a 3-4-5 triangle. The numbers are friendly, and they work. We don’t usually make this explicit, but I bet that many of us also carry that triangle around in our own heads as an internal prototype for how right triangles work—and we hope our students will, too. (The sine-cosine-1 triangle is another such prototype that develops later.)

In teaching about (frequentist) hypothesis testing, I use the Aunt Belinda problem as a prototype for testing a proportion (against 0.5). It’s specific to me—not as universal as 3-4-5.

Part of this Bayesian quest, I realized, is to find a great example or two that really make Bayesian inference clear: some context and calculation that we can return to to disconfuse ourselves when we need it.

### The Paper Cup Example

Here’s the one I was thinking about. I’ll describe it here; later I’ll explain what I think is wrong with it.

I like including empirical probability alongside the theoretical. Suppose you toss a paper cup ten times, and 8 of those times it lands on its side. At that point, from an empirical perspective, P( side ) = 8/10. It’s the best information we have about the cup. Now we toss it again and it lands on its side. Now the empirical probability changes to 9/11.

How can we use a Bayesian mechanism, with 8/10 as the prior, to generate the posterior probability of 9/11?

It seemed to me (wrongly) that this was a natural. Continue reading The Search for a Great Bayesian Example

## Early Bump in the Bayesian Road: a Search for Intuition

Last time, I introduced a quest—it’s time I learned more about Bayesian inference—and admitted how hard some of it is. I wrote,

The minute I take it out of context, or even very far from the ability to look at the picture, I get amazingly flummoxed by the abstraction. I mean,

$P(A \mid B) = \frac{P(A)P(B \mid A)}{P(B)}$

just doesn’t roll of the tongue. I have to look it up in a way that I never have to with Pythagoras, or the quadratic formula, or rules of logs (except for changing bases, which feels exactly like this), or equations in kinematics.

Which prompted this comment from gasstationwithoutpumps:

I find it easiest just to keep coming back to the definition of conditional probability P(A|B) = P(A & B) / P(B). There is no complexity here…(and more)

Which is true, of course. But for this post I’d like to focus on the intuition, not the math. That is, I’m a mathy-sciencey person learning something new, trying to record myself in the act of learning it. And here’s this bump in the road: What’s up with my having so much trouble with a pretty simple formula? (And what can I learn about what my own students are going through?) Continue reading Early Bump in the Bayesian Road: a Search for Intuition