2008 NOV 3 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to a study from the United States, "Karl Pearson played an enormous role in determining the content and organization of statistical research in his day, through his research, his teaching, his establishment of laboratories, and his initiation of a vast publishing program."

  "His technical contributions had initially and continue today to have a profound impact upon the work of both applied and theoretical statisticians, partly through their inadequately acknowledged influence upon Ronald A. Fisher," wrote S.M. Stigler and colleagues ...read more

  2008 NOV 3 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "Model selection and assessment with incomplete data pose challenges in addition to the ones encountered with complete data. There are two main reasons for this," scientists writing in the journal Statistical Science report.

  "First, many models describe characteristics of the complete data, in spite of the fact that only an incomplete subset is observed. Direct comparison between model and data is then less than straightforward. Second, many commonly used models are more sensitive to assumptions than in the complete-data situation and some of their properties vanish when they are fitted to incomplete, unbalanced data. These and other issues are brought forward using two key examples, one of a continuous and one of a categorical nature," wrote G. Verbeke and colleagues, University of Leuven ...read more

  2008 NOV 3 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "Current reporting of results based on Markov chain Monte Carlo computations could be improved. In particular, a measure of the accuracy of the resulting estimates is rarely reported," scientists in the United States report.

  "Thus we have little ability to objectively assess the quality of the reported estimates. We address this issue in that we discuss why Monte Carlo standard errors are important, how they can be easily calculated in Markov chain Monte Carlo and how they can be used to decide when to stop the simulation," wrote J.M. Flegal and colleagues, University of California ...read more