In beach volleyball there is a serving disadvantage, the team receiving serve has a higher than 50% probability of winning while receiving (also called “siding out”). This makes for exciting end-games with a lot of back and forth. If the game is tied…

This summer The Economist posted an article on how pooling COVID-19 tests can allow testing more people with fewer test-kits. The idea is to combine a group of people into a single batch-test, if the batch comes out negative they everyone in the…

What is the distribution of the number of non-zero counts in a multinomial distribution? I recently answered this question on mathematics stackexchange. This question comes up in the field of ecology: When a researcher wants to know the number of…

Normalt siges det, at man skal afbetale det dyre banklån før man afdrager på sit realkreditlån. Men ofte kan det betale sig at dele realkreditlånet op og afdrage på en del af det - et såkaldt to-lags lån. Jeg har lavet en beregner, hvor man kan…

In a previous post I dived into the Danish Ministry of Educations school initiative to lift schools having a large amount of students with poor academic performance. The point made in the post was that the evaluation of the schools relied on so…

Last week the weekly magazine Weekend Avisen brought a story on the first year results of a governmental initiative to incentivise danish schools with poor academic performance. A schools performance is measured by the percentage of graduating…

You might want to argue that the question in the subtitle is based on a false premise; the p-value is related to the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis conditional on the level () and the null hypothesis being true. The question of…

Our paper on Significance Evaluation in Factor Graphs has just been published. In the paper we investigate how to evaluate the significance of rare events for a wide-class of models defined by factor graphs. Factor graphs are a graphical model…

Automatic Differentiation (AD) specifically reverse-mode AD takes a function, defined by a computer program and computes the gradient exactly (up to machine precision) and at the same time complexity as the original program. Here I will show how one…

I recently wanted to retrieve all SNP’s from dbSNP overlapping a set of regions using UCSC’s MySQL interface. This post shows you how this can be done and how to increase the speed of queries by using UCSC’s binning scheme. First things first - we…

I recently attended the UseR! conference in Aalborg. It was a great conference with great tutorials, good talks and foremost a lot of interesting people. As I grew up in Aalborg I could not help feeling a bit proud, that the city and the mathematics…

Given a male patient 45 years of age and a BMI of 27 how great is the risk of having diabetes? What is the relationship between the chance of wining an election and the campaign budget? How does the probability of playing in NBA increase with height…