stan

UFO sighting data A recent #TidyTuesday data set piqued my interest. It’s a rather large collection of worldwide reportings of UFO sightings. Interesting. You can download the data yourself and load it into R: library("readr") ufo_sightings = read_csv("ufo_sightings.csv") ufo_sightings contains information about thousands of UFO sightings. Each sighting contains information such as the date and time (reported_date_time, day_part) of the sighting, the location (city, state, country) of the sighting, and other information such as a freetext summary.

A little bit about you Let’s assume you’re familiar with Bayesian statistics; you know what I mean when I say prior, likelihood and posterior. Recall that an MCMC scheme constructs a Markov chain as a method to sample from the posterior density. You may have used a probabilistic programming language (PPL) in the past, such as BUGS, to perform Bayesian inference. You’ve heard about Stan and want to learn a little more.

We have a great selection of online public training courses coming up over the next two months, including a variety of R courses, as well as some more stats-heavy courses on Bayesian Inference! Read on for a taste of what’s in store, or head over to our training page for full details and to book! Bayesian Inference Our upcoming courses on Bayesian inference take you from an introduction through to implementing models using Stan with R.

This blog post was written by our intern Osheen Macoscar. 2020 is a year most of us would like to leave behind. But not all change is bad, and many interesting developments, especially in education, happened due to the constraints imposed by COVID. Like many other training providers, we had to pivot to online learning, which brought with it challenges but also new opportunities. This review will hopefully offer some insight into what the year looked like for our trainers and training course attendees with some key facts and figures along the way.

Good news! In tandom with the loosening of lockdown restrictions, Jumping Rivers has released the updated 2021 public, online training course schedule. We are offering courses across multiple programming languages, including R, Python, Stan, Scala and git. In the past year, we have converted all of our courses to be online friendly and have recieved great feedback in relation to interactivity, course structure and overall attendee satisfaction. Some examples of feedback we have recieved can be seen below:

Don’t we all miss 2019 (blame Covid for the long delay in this post). The days of going to work and seeing your work colleagues face to face - and for some of you, attending one of our on-site training courses! 2019 was a great year for us. Not only have we broken new boundaries, we have recruited new full-time staff which have furthermore contributed to the glowing success of the company.

This year we had the privilege of sponsoring StanCon. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to actually attend the conference. Rather than let our ticket go to waste, we ran a small competition, which Ignacio Martinez won with his very cool (but in alpha stage) R package. Do you use Professional Posit Products? If so, check out our managed Posit services Highlights from StanCon 2018 During my econ PhD I learned a lot about frequentist statistics.

The prize How do I enter? FAQ Today we are happy to announce our Stan contest. Something we feel very strongly at Jumping Rivers is giving back to the community. We have benefited immensely from hard work by numerous people, so when possible, we try to give something back. This year we’re sponsoring StanCon 2018. If you don’t know, Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software for facilitating statistical inference at the frontiers of applied statistics.

Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software for facilitating statistical inference at the frontiers of applied statistics. Or to put it another way, it makes Bayesian inference fast and (a bit) easier. StanCon is the premier conference for all things Stan related and this year it will take place at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, a National Historic Landmark on the Monterey Peninsula right on the beach. RStan and other interfaces One of the great features about Stan is that you can use Stan via R (or Python or …).