Gianluca Baio’s blog

Bayesian statistics, health economics and random stuff

Measuring the effect of the hostile environment policy

This post is syndicated from Sample Space, the magazine of the UCL Department of Statistical Science
16 February, 2024
Gianluca Baio
5 min

Research, teaching and nuclear disasters

This is probably going to be a very boring post, if anything because I do this so seldom, nowadays, that surely I’ve forgotten how to write blog posts (assuming I’ve ever…
12 September, 2023
Gianluca Baio
8 min

Summary function in survhe

I’ve been made aware that in the whole restructuring I’ve done to survHE there was something that escaped my control and so there’s a tiny bug in the current CRAN version…
23 May, 2023
Gianluca Baio
1 min

blendR — the package

We have some exciting updates from our work on “blending survival curves” for HTA — the paper is out in the print version of MDM, this week (though it’s come out as an…
11 December, 2022
Gianluca Baio
2 min

Oh, Vienna!

This week I’m in beatiful Vienna for Ispor Europe, which is always a big deal around HTA… The last two, of course, have been mainly online, which was OK — but ISPOR is a big …
6 November, 2022
Gianluca Baio
2 min

Another migration

This is the first post in a while, but also an important one, as it’s the first time I’m writing under the brand new incarnation of the website, after migrating from wowchemy…
10 October, 2022
Gianluca Baio
3 min

new BCEA

Nathan and I — well the more correct version of this statement is “Nathan”… — have been working on a few relatively major improvements on BCEA and have managed to push all…
25 August, 2022
Gianluca Baio
3 min

Summer school in Lausanne

I think it’s now official: after a couple of years in which Covid has ruined everything, we’re now returning with our summer school on Bayesian methods in health economics!
5 April, 2022
Gianluca Baio
2 min

survHE light

The instructions for installations described below are now (as of April 2023) superseded — see here!
18 January, 2022
4 min

Armitage lecture

This week has been a fantastic one. I went to Cambridge to give the 18th Armitage Lecture; I have to say, when I was invited back in the summer, my first reaction was of…
12 November, 2021
4 min

New version

I’ve managed to update my website to the newest version of wowchemy (that’s the engine that, together with blogdown runs the show, behind the scenes). Most changes are…
2 October, 2021
2 min

Euros prediction (5)

Final time — the model (and bookies) predictions have indeed materialised and Italy face England in the final. I’ve done the final update after the semi-finals and here’s…
10 July, 2021
2 min

Euros prediction (4)

I haven’t posted the results for the quarter-finals ahead of the games, but I did run the model and here were the predictions.
6 July, 2021
4 min

Don’t just take my word for it

Rob (who, together with his team, has been brilliant in the process of publishing and managing BMHE and BMPR) has alerted me to the fact thatour edited book “Bayesian…
5 July, 2021
1 min

Euros prediction (3)

OK: I’ve now re-run the model using the updated data including all the games after the group stage. Firstly, a few comments/caveates:
26 June, 2021
3 min

Euros prediction (2)

This is a follow up on my previous post. The group stage is now finished and I have updated the model as more games were being played. In particular, I have slightly changed…
24 June, 2021
3 min

Euros prediction

I wasn’t going to do much about this (and probably, I shouldn’t have done anything and used my time more wisely…), but a couple of friends/colleagues have actually asked me…
14 June, 2021
11 min

The duke of hazard

More changes to survHE. Earlier this week, I gave a talk at the Virtual Ispor US conference (our panel was W11). In preparation for the panel (and other things I was doing…
22 May, 2021
2 min

What if there’s no censoring?…

Philip Cooney has alerted me to a slight inconsistency in survHE. Basically, he was trying to work in a setting where the data contain no censoring, using the HMC/rstan model…
14 May, 2021
2 min

Heading there

This is, in many ways, very old news — but last summer (sic!) I applied for and was made the new Head of Department of UCL Statistical Science (and I think — checks in place…
12 April, 2021
4 min

EVPPI in Windows

A couple of colleagues have alerted us to some issues with the BCEA function evppi, under MS Windows. Basically, it seemed as if under MS Windows and with R 4.0.0 (which is…
9 April, 2021
2 min

Little bugs in survHE

Earlier this week, while I was working on my second-last lecture of the year (I’ve been relatively good and the vast majority of the new material I had to prepare to make…
14 March, 2021
2 min

Master to main

Earlier today I finally managed to understand the process and then implement the renaming of the default branch in my GitHub repositories. This follows a relatively old…
5 February, 2021
1 min

Fixes in survHE

I know… long time no speak and the rest… I do feel a bit guilty about it — and I do have lots of good excuses for not having posted almost at all in the recent past and…
18 January, 2021
2 min

My thoughts on the R-HTA workshops

Last Friday on Monday, we held our online R-HTA workshop. We will discuss the feedback and agree on ways forward in the consortium Scientific Committee soon, but I thought…
14 October, 2020
8 min

Books and code

This comes as the results of two external forces that have prompted me to do some work on the website — specifically the section on books.
4 August, 2020
2 min

CannaBayes trial

Our paper on the CBD trial has just been published in The Lancet Psychiatry (and found its way through the media, for example here or here). Basically, the objective was to…
30 July, 2020
2 min

Another referendum

I was reading the (Italian) newspapers today and saw a few articles about the upcoming Referendum. It will be held in September and it will legislate about whether the…
26 July, 2020
6 min

xls2BCEA

I [Gianluca] have already mentioned this: Nathan (who’s actually written this post) has started doing work on BCEA — here’s another very cool idea he’s had. We’re planning…
24 July, 2020
7 min

Refactor

This is quite exciting: since Nathan (this is his very interesting blog) has arrived to UCL a couple of months ago, we’ve started to work on quite a few of very interesting…
23 July, 2020
2 min

INXS


This is now borderline very old, although sadly not out of trend… In May/early June, Marta, Michela, Monica and I, together with colleagues at the Italian Statistical…
7 July, 2020
13 min

Tutorials

This is, as usual, a long-time coming and very delayed (you can guess where the hold up was — with me, in case you couldn’t…), but: I finally managed to update the R-HTA…
25 June, 2020
1 min

Open day

Although the world is very complicated right now, we’re still planning ahead for the next academic year — particularly for the new cohort of HEDS. We are setting up a…
10 June, 2020
1 min

Postponed

I’ve been trying to put this off for as long as I possibly could, because I didn’t really want to surrender… BUT: It’s come to the time when I need to accept defeat and that…
18 May, 2020
1 min

missingHE update

Andrea has just released a major update for missingHE (this is my own fork of the main project — but now available on CRAN too), the package we (well, mostly he!) have (has)…
4 May, 2020
1 min

Expert opinion (again)

This is the second video I was mentioning here — took a while to get out but it’s available now. I think you need to register here and then you can see our panel discussion.…
30 April, 2020
1 min

Book out (nearly)

Earlier this week, we’ve got confirmation that our book on Bayesian methods in pharmaceutical research will publish shortly! The book is listed at £115, but currently there…
7 April, 2020
1 min

Hypothetical short course

The good news is that ISPOR have accepted a proposal that I have submitted, together with Felicity Lamrock, Howard Thom and Rose Hart to do a short course entitled “Health…
31 March, 2020
1 min

In case you don’t know it

At this stage, given what I’ve said yesterday, even if you only get your news (abotu me, anyway) from the blog, you should know from other media about this.
4 March, 2020
2 min

Like a bad husband

As I was coming back home on my delayed train from a day-long meeting at work, it occurred to me that I should feel very badly because it is fair to say that, of late, I…
3 March, 2020
2 min

Expert opinion

When I was at ISPOR in Copenhagen, earlier last year, I was asked by The Evidence Base to participate in two interviews — one was just me talking about “Value and advanced…
26 February, 2020
1 min

VoI world tour

Next week (Wednesday 26th February, at 12pm) I’ll be in Warwick to give a talk on our work on Value of Information. I’ve given a similar one fairly recently, at the MRC…
20 February, 2020
1 min

Recruitment

Here’s the official blurb we’ve prepared to advertise recruitment to our MSc Programme in Health Economics and Decision Science. And yes: we can also do a gym session, if…
6 February, 2020
3 min

Come and work with us!

We have an exciting opportunity in my group at UCL. We have a 5-year Senior Research Fellowship in Statistics and Health Economics — all details here. The post is Grade 8 wit…
12 December, 2019
2 min

Have I thought this through?

Of the many phrases and idioms in the English language, I think “have you thought this through” is one of my favourites — perhaps it’s the allitteration or that, if you’re…
25 November, 2019
3 min

New dates for the summer school

We’re nearly ready to advertise the new edition of our Florence summer school on “Bayesian methods in health economics”. This year, we’ve decided to change slightly the…
25 November, 2019
2 min

Sharing (slides) is caring…

Earlier in November, I went to Copenhagen for the ISPOR conference. The first time I did go was in 2002 and for a while, I kind of lost interest (although I have still gone…
25 November, 2019
3 min

Workshop at UCL

Next week, we’ll have the pleasure to host Mike Paulden, James O’Mahony and Chris Sampson. Mike is coming back to the UK in the run-up to the holidays and so we jumped on…
25 November, 2019
3 min

Available to preorder

I think we have the final version of the cover for our upcoming book Bayesian Methods in Pharmaceutical Research (BMPR), which I edited together with Emmanuel Lesaffre and Br…
11 November, 2019
3 min

Happy Birthday

My colleague (and lovely person!) Bianca forwarded me an advert for a very interesting event, she is organising at UCL. This is a celebration for the 80th birthday of Harvey…
24 September, 2019
2 min

Health economics training in the Autumn

I’m more or less back full time from an interesting summer break — Marta and I decided that going to a conference two 7-hours flight away, with two children (7 and not even…
30 August, 2019
3 min

A couple of things…

Yes — there’s a couple of things I wanted to share. Firstly, our chapter on Bayesian Statistical Economic Evaluation Methods for Health Technology Assessment has just…
27 June, 2019
2 min

My talks in Albacete

To (almost) complete the very busy period of travelling and talks, this week I’m in Albacete, Castilla/La Mancha to take part in the conference of the Spanish Health…
11 June, 2019
2 min

Nearly Bye Bye, Florence

I’m (nearly) finished with our summer school in Florence — we only have tomorrow left, when Anna and I will speak a bit more about Value of Information (and specifically…
6 June, 2019
3 min

Job @ Oxford

Boby Mihaylova has two exciting posts available at the Health Economics Research Centre at the University of Oxford. In particular, she is looking for two R-minded…
28 May, 2019
3 min

Kings of Lyon

I am in Lyon for a couple of days for our annual Bayes 20XX/Bayesian Biostatistics conference. I couldn’t be here for the whole time, courtesy of exams period, but what I…
24 May, 2019
3 min

Make R Great Again

Our editorial on using R in HTA (I talked about it here) has finally been published in Value in Health.
17 May, 2019
2 min

Job in local council

At work, we often receive emails from people advertising relevant jobs so we can pass these onto our students. One that we received recently is this from Richmond upon…
2 May, 2019
2 min

RSS feed

In recent weeks I happened to talk to a couple of (very nice!) people, who said they were keen followers of my blog. Alas, since I’ve moved the blog from blogspot to blogdown…
29 April, 2019
1 min

Changes in BCEA

I’ve just updated the GitHub’s version of BCEA. Andrea has done, as usual, some very nice work – this time he’s mainly focussed on the graphical engine underlying the graphs…
27 March, 2019
2 min

Prosecutor’s fallacy — Brexit style

When it comes to Brexit, I’m finding harder and harder to concentrate and either pretend that nothing bad is happening or actually acknowledging all the madness going around…
13 March, 2019
5 min

RSS-UCL Conference on Teaching Statistics in Higher Education

Some of my colleagues at UCL are organising a very interesting conference on teaching statistics in higher education. I think it will be very good, with people showing…
13 March, 2019
1 min

Busy summer ahead

Summer is really going to be busy, this year. But in a good way…
15 February, 2019
3 min

Stats in the newspapers

As I’m waiting to catch my flight back from Stockholm (where I had a rather interesting meeting discussing Bayesian network meta-analysis. But I digress…), I am browsing the…
15 February, 2019
2 min

My talk @ Imperial Infectious Disease

Today I went to the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College, to give a talk on our work on HPV vaccination. Eventually we managed to published both the applied…
24 January, 2019
2 min

Applications open

Applications are open for students enrolling in our MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science, for the academic year 2019 / 2020. Next year will be the third since we’ve…
17 January, 2019
3 min

Mistakes in the book

<img src=“https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1482921647l/31456756.jpg”, width = “200”, height = “300” style=“float: left;margin-right: 20px;margin-top…
8 January, 2019
2 min

New stuff in BCEA

After my talks in Barcelona, I have started thinking about potential improvements or changes, mostly to do in BCEA — I got some nice comments from quite a few people, some…
11 December, 2018
2 min

Lots on missing

The last couple of weeks, there’s been lots of output from our work on Bayesian models for missing data coming out. Firstly, I participated in the workshop we did at ISPOR…
27 November, 2018
2 min

Scandi-(snow)blanche

I’m on my way back from Stockholm, where I’ve spent one day giving talks (I mean I was invited to speak at events, not like a crazy person harassing people on the street to…
27 November, 2018
3 min

A week in Barcelona (2)

ISPOR conference is nearly over — still a couple of interesting sessions to go. Yesterday we did our session on missing data (not sure why my name doesn’t appear there — but…
14 November, 2018
2 min

A week in Barcelona (1)

This week I’m in Barcelona for the ISPOR European conference. The conference is usually big, but my first impression is that this year is actually huge! The plenary session…
12 November, 2018
1 min

survHE new release

I have just submitted a revised version of survHE on CRAN — it should be up very shortly. This will be version 1.0.64 and its main feature is a major restructuring in the…
19 October, 2018
1 min

Todos deberiamos ser Bayesianos(?)

I can’t remember why, but earlier today I was filtering my emails and I found one in which I was pointing my MSc students (on my UCL Bayesian Methods in Health Economics modu…
16 October, 2018
1 min

WoRkshop in ToRonto

Petros and his colleagues at DARTH have organised a workshop on Decision Modeling in R, in Toronto (Canada) — the exact dates are 5-7 December 2018.
16 October, 2018
2 min

Seminar @ UCL

As part of our MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science programme, we have a very exciting seminar to open up the academic year — incidentally, we now have 32 students…
2 October, 2018
2 min

More health economics in R

Nathan Green has alerted/invited me to another workshop aimed at increasing the use of R in Health Economics. He and I had some discussion in the past few months and…
23 September, 2018
2 min

My talk @ York

I first visited York as an Erasmus student, back in the last century. I was studying in Sheffield, which isn’t too far, together with three friends from Florence (and a…
19 September, 2018
2 min

survHE update

Because I have been preparing an extended presentation on (Bayesian) survival analysis in health economic evaluation, I took the opportunity to make some tweaks to survHE —…
10 September, 2018
2 min

Wake me up, when September ends…

In the past few years, the month of September has become really busy for me.
4 September, 2018
3 min

Lectureship in Health Economics @ UCL

I’ve been asked by my colleagues at the Institute of Global Health (with whom we run the MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science) to advertise a new Lecturer post…
21 August, 2018
1 min

Sleek & Shiny

I was trying to find an apt image to accompany this post, but googling “sleek and shiny” mostly brought up images of women with ridiculously, well, sleek and shiny hair (and…
16 July, 2018
1 min

R in HTA workshop

Today we’ve had our workshop on “R for trial and model-based cost-effectiveness analysis”, at UCL. I really enjoyed the whole day — we had several interesting presentations…
11 July, 2018
3 min

Missing you

The other day, I went to one of the UCL Priment seminar sessions — these are usually very interesting as they combine one methodological seminar with another that is more…
28 June, 2018
2 min

Fake code

Andrea (who’s one of my co-autors in our book on BCEA) has pointed out a couple of typos/imprecisions he just discovered in the book, while he was doing some more work, I…
26 June, 2018
2 min

Face the music

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20 June, 2018
2 min

Summer school: check

In the last week, I’ve been in Florence for our Summer School in Bayesian methods in health economics.
10 June, 2018
3 min

Busy talking

This month of May I’ve been rather busy giving talks at different places/events.
31 May, 2018
1 min

αντιο σας

As I’m preparing to make my way to the airport to go back home, I have a moment to write about these past few days I’ve spent in Athens to visit my friends/colleagues Nikos a…
4 May, 2018
2 min

Almost full

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28 April, 2018
1 min

Howyoudoin?

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27 April, 2018
1 min

Magna Graecia and Cambria

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17 April, 2018
2 min

Bayesian supermarket

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13 April, 2018
2 min

Welcome home!

At the end of our little UK-France-Italy tour, we’ve finally got back home. And we had a very nice surprise — this is the first time something like this has happened to me.…
12 April, 2018
1 min

Tales and stuff…

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2 April, 2018
2 min

The migration

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29 March, 2018
2 min

Not long until abstract submission deadline…

Registration and Abstract Submission Open for
19 March, 2018
Gianluca Baio
3 min

Free tweets

As part of their marketing strategy, Springer have tweeted a link to free download of Chapter 1 of our BCEA book. The tweet went out last Friday, but I think there’s still…
18 March, 2018
Gianluca Baio
1 min

HTA R Us

Together with colleagues around the UK, we’re organising a workshop on the use of R for statistical modelling in health economic evaluation (broadly speaking…
5 March, 2018
Gianluca Baio
7 min

Significance early-career writing competition

We’ve just issued the call for entries for our 2018 writing competition for early-career statisticians. Details of the competition are available online here.
2 March, 2018
Gianluca Baio
1 min

Job advert

We have a job opening at UCL − this time is in the Institute of Clinical Trials & Methodology and is for a Research Associate in Health Economics. Full details below.
2 March, 2018
Gianluca Baio
2 min

Commonwealth Games

<img src=“../img/Commonwealth_Flags.gif”, width = “500”, height = “1200” style=“float: left;margin-right: 20px;margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom:0px;”/>
Earlier this week, we…
21 February, 2018
Gianluca Baio
2 min

Acro-juggling

Yesterday, we held our UCL Health Economics Network Symposium.
6 February, 2018
1 min

PhD studentships @ UCL

My department at UCL has been allocated 1 EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) award for 2018/19. The award will be 4 years in duration (or 6 years for part-time…
21 January, 2018
1 min

501 days of Summer (school)

As I anticipated earlier, we’re now ready to open registration for our Summer School in Florence (I was waiting for UCL to set up the registration system and thought it may…
19 January, 2018
2 min

If you’ve got an issue…

I’ve just got an email alert to the very last issue of Medical Decision Making, which I found very, very interesting.
18 January, 2018
1 min

500 days of Summer (school)

We’re nearly ready to advertise the 2018 edition of our Florence Summer School on Bayesian Methods in Health Economics (some posts from last year are here and here )! The…
17 January, 2018
1 min

Bayes 2018/Bayesian Biostatistics

This year, our annual Bayes 20XX conference has been jointly organised with the MRC Biostatistics Unit Cambridge and is also a satellite event before the main ISBAconference…
16 January, 2018
1 min

Brexit^{-1}

I’ve been asked to post about the EuroCIM (European Causal Inference Meeting), which will be held later this year in Florence. I very happily oblige, because: a) this is…
15 January, 2018
2 min

MSc studentships @ UCL

Two National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) studentships in Medical Statistics are available for the 2018/19 academic year. The studentships cover tuition fees at the…
10 January, 2018
1 min

A Bayesian analysis of polls in the Catalan elections

I have been involved in the planning and analysis or survey polls almost since I came back to Albacete 9 years ago. Last months in Spanish politics have been dominated by…
22 December, 2017
3 min

Does Peppa Pig encourage inappropriate use of primary care resources?

This is a very important contribution to the medical literature, recently published in the BMJ.
19 December, 2017
1 min

Unpleasantville

Last week, Kristian Lum has written a blog post to report her experience of inappropriate behaviour by some senior male colleagues at statistical conferences (ISBA and JSM…
18 December, 2017
4 min

βCEA

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the beta version of BCEA (I was after all born in Agrigento \(-\) in the picture to the left \(-\), which is a Greek city, so a…
21 November, 2017
2 min

La lotteria dei rigori

Seems like my own country has kind of run out of luck… First we fail to qualify for the World Cup, then lose the right to host the relocated headquarters of the European…
20 November, 2017
2 min

Relocation relocation relocation

Earlier today, I was contacted by Politico \(-\) they are covering the story about the European Union’s process to reassign the two EU agencies currently located in London…
14 November, 2017
2 min

At the Oscars!

Well, these days being part of the glittering world of show-biz is not necessarily a good thing, but when your life is soooo glamorous that someone feels the unstoppable…
10 November, 2017
2 min

The Alan Turing’s project

The Alan Turing Institute (ATI) has just announced the next round of Doctoral Studentships.
17 October, 2017
3 min

Summer school in Leuven

Emmanuel has organised earlier this year the first edition of the Summer School on Advanced Bayesian Methods, in the beautiful Belgian town of Leuven (which is also where we…
9 October, 2017
1 min

Building the EVSI

Anna and I have just arxived a paper (that we’ve also submitted to Value in Health), in which we’re trying to publicise more widely and in a less technical way the “Moment…
8 September, 2017
1 min

Planes trains and automobiles

For some reason, Kobi’s favourite thing in the world is flying on an airplane, with making paper airplanes a very closed second and playing airport pretending to check…
7 September, 2017
2 min

A couple of things…

Just a couple of interesting things…
30 August, 2017
4 min

When simple becomes complicated…

A while ago Anna and I published an editorial in Global & Regional Health Technology Assessment. In the paper we discuss one of my favourite topics \(-\) how models for…
14 August, 2017
1 min

Picky people (2)

I’ve complained here about the fonts for some parts of the computer code in our book . Eva (our publisher) has picked up on this and has been brilliant and very quick in…
28 July, 2017
1 min

Conflict of interest

I am fully aware that this post is seriously affected by a conflict of interest because what I’m about to discuss (in positive terms!) is work by Anthony who’s doing a very…
7 July, 2017
1 min

Picky people

Our book on Bayesian cost-effectiveness analysis using BCEA is out (I think as of last week). This has been a long process (I’ve talked about this here, here and here).
20 June, 2017
1 min

Homecoming (of sort…)

I spent last week in Florence for our Summer School. Of course, it was home-coming for me and I really enjoyed being back to Florence \(-\) although it was really hot. I…
19 June, 2017
2 min

Surprise?

So: for once I woke up this morning feeling slightly quite tired for the late night, but also rather upbeat after an election. The final results of the general election are o…
9 June, 2017
6 min

Break

Today I’ve taken a break from the general election modelling \(-\) well, not really… Of course I’ve checked whether there were new polls available and have updated the model!
7 June, 2017
1 min

The Inbetweeners

When it first was shown, I really liked “The Inbetweeners” \(-\) it was at times quite rude and cheap, but it did make me laugh, despite the fact that, as it often happens…
6 June, 2017
4 min

The code (and other stuff…)

I’ve received a couple of emails or comments on one of the General Election posts to ask me to share the code I’ve used.
2 June, 2017
5 min

The swingers

Kaleb has left a comment on a previous post, asking what constituencies my model predicted to change hands, with respect to the 2015 election. This is not too difficult to…
30 May, 2017
3 min

(Too) slowly but surely?

After the tragic events in Manchester and the suspension in the campaigns, things have started again and a couple new polls have been released. Some of the media have also…
26 May, 2017
2 min

Quick update

This is going to be a very short post. I’ve been again following the latest polls and have updated my election forecast model \(-\) nothing has changed in the general…
22 May, 2017
3 min

Through time & space

I’ve continued to fill in the data from the polls and re-run the model for the next UK general election. I think the dynamic element is interesting in principle, mainly…
15 May, 2017
3 min

Flash forward sampling

Slowly but surely, I’ve managed to think a bit more about the elections model. Here, I’ve described how I included some prior information in my model to try and “discount”…
5 May, 2017
Gianluca Baio
4 min

Face value

I found a little more time to think about the election model and fiddle with the set up, as well as use some more recent polls \(-\) I have now managed to get 9 polls…
28 April, 2017
8 min

Snap

In the grand tradition of all recent election times, I’ve decided to have a go and try and build a model that could predict the results of the upcoming snap general election…
25 April, 2017
7 min

Post-doc

If you fancy becoming like the crazy, purple minion, we have a Research Associated position at the UCL Institute for Global Health (with whom I’ve been heavily involved in…
20 April, 2017
1 min

Hope & Faith

In a remarkable and unpredictable (may be?) turn of events, the UK Prime Minister has today sort-of-called a general election for this coming June \(-\) sort-of, if you…
18 April, 2017
4 min

Workshop on The Regression Discontinuity Design

As part of our bid to get an MRC grant (which we managed to do), we promised that, if successful, we’d also have a dissemination workshop, at the end of the project. Well…
18 April, 2017
1 min

The greedy baker with a full barrel and a drunken wife

Earlier this week, I gave a talk at one of the UCL Priment seminars. The session was organised around two presentations aimed at discussing the definition and differences…
31 March, 2017
6 min

Coming soon!

We’ve just received a picture of the cover of the BCEA book, which is really, really close to being finally published!
21 February, 2017
2 min

Three rooms left…

Last December, Kobi and his classmates did their Christmas play, which was based on a relatively close representation of the Nativity (well \(-\) perhaps back then shepherds…
26 January, 2017
1 min

Face value

This is actually a not-so-recent paper, but I’ve only discovered now and I think it’s very interesting. The underlying issue is about trying to do “causal inference” from…
23 January, 2017
2 min

New year resolution

Now that the Christmas break is just a distant memory (Marta would say that I am quite happy with that \(-\) she thinks I’m like the Grinch around the Christmas holiday. And…
13 January, 2017
2 min

Movie stars

Our search for potential alternatives to an academic career, in the face of increasing competition and difficulties in securing grant money has now led Jolene, Marcos and me…
16 December, 2016
1 min

Bayes 2017

We’ve just opened the call for abstract for the next edition of the Bayes Workshop \(-\) this time we’re going to Spain and to be more precise to Albacete.
15 December, 2016
1 min

PhD opportunity!

Applications are invited for a PhD funding opportunity to conduct research in a branch of probability or statistics based in the UCL Department of Statistical Science…
15 December, 2016
2 min

Nomen omen

After resisting this for way too long, I’ve finally decided it was time to release more widely a couple of the R packages I’ve been working on \(-\) I’ve put them on GitHub…
9 December, 2016
2 min

Good stuff around

Lately, I’ve been publicising quite heavily our Summer school and new MSc, but of course, we’re not the only one to plan for interesting things worth mentioning \(-\) well…
2 December, 2016
1 min

Come & play with us!

We’re starting to build up the promotional material for our new MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science. Here’s the first of a few videos we’ve filmed!
23 November, 2016
1 min

Summer School: Bayesian Methods in Health Economics

We’re finally ready to advertise our new Summer School on Bayesian Methods in Health Economics, in Florence, 12-16 June 2017! This is basically combining the two short…
21 November, 2016
3 min

Elections and the law of large numbers

I know most people have been caught up in the minor and irrelevant issue of the US presidential election \(-\) what really mattered in the past couple of weeks was another…
19 November, 2016
1 min

Lectureship @ UCL

As part of our new MSc in Health Economics and Decision Science, we’re recruiting a lecturer \(-\) the job advert with all the relevant details are here. The post will be…
8 November, 2016
1 min

Always take the weather with you…

Last week, we were in lovely Andalusia \(-\) it was Kobi’s first half term holiday at school and so we decided to make the most of it. It was actually an awesome week \(-\) w…
5 November, 2016
1 min

Masters of some

This is really exciting \(-\) well, at least for us… Our new Masters in Health Economics and Decision Sciences is up and running and applications are now open for the next…
10 October, 2016
2 min

Shiny happy people in the land of the Czar

During the summer, we’ve worked silently but relentlessly to set up a departmental server that could run R-Shiny applications.
7 October, 2016
2 min

LGM 2016

Yesterday I went to beautiful Bath for The Fifth Workshop on Bayesian Inference for Latent Gaussian Models with Applications and give a talk on our work on INLA-SPDE to…
15 September, 2016
1 min

The fix

This is a very interesting post by Martyn Plummer on the JAGS News blog, describing how apparently silly details may make a world of difference. I think Martyn says he’s now…
15 September, 2016
1 min

Careful whisper

PREFACE: This post is only partially a grumpy man’s emotional outburst: just hear me out on this one…
13 September, 2016
2 min

Sad night

I’ve just heard the very sad news that Richard Nixon has passed away this morning. I can’t say I knew Richard very well, but I thought he really was a lovely guy and I am…
26 August, 2016
2 min

National lottery

Yesterday, many British newspapers have covered the news of the new Dementia Atlas, released by the Department of Health.
17 August, 2016
2 min

Finish line (nearly)

We are very close to the finish line \(-\) that’s being able to finally submit the BCEA book to the editor (Springer).
15 July, 2016
3 min

Bad medical journal

This is an interesting story, I think and I have to say I’m sort of being inspired in the title of the post from a talk that Stephen Senn gave a while back at UCL. He in…
6 July, 2016
6 min

Fire and mouse alarm

Yesterday we finally had our workshop on infectious disease modelling in health economic evaluation. I think the day went very well and we had very interesting talks (as…
5 July, 2016
2 min

Silver lining

Fivethirtyeight has just published their first prediction for the next US presidential election, stating that Clinton has around 80% chance of winning to Trumps’ 20%. This…
30 June, 2016
1 min

My week at ISBA (2)

I should add to my previous post that while there have been many very good talks, I thought two were incredibly good: David Spiegelhalter’s Foundational lecture on Monday and …
17 June, 2016
2 min

My week at ISBA

I’ve spent the last few days in beautiful Sardinia for the ISBA world conference. The place is outstanding, really beautiful, although it’s kind of weird that there is no…
17 June, 2016
2 min

Workshop on Infectious Disease Modelling in Public Health Policy: Current status and challenges (yet again)

I’ve written about this a couple of times already (here and here). We’ve finalised the speakers line up (see here for the latest information) and I think this is a very…
17 June, 2016
1 min

Large enough probability?

I’ve deliberately stayed away from the Brexit referendum (that is in terms of spending time doing some modelling to see what the predictions may be) \(-\) mostly because I…
3 June, 2016
1 min

Bayes 2016

Earlier this week I was at the Bayes 2016 meeting, in lovely Leuven. Although I’ve been to Belgium quite a few times before, this was my first trip to Leuven \(-\) somebody…
23 May, 2016
2 min

BCEA 2.2-3 is out

I think the newest release of BCEA, our R package to standardise and post-process the output of a health economic model, is now available from CRAN \(-\) in fact, the source…
22 May, 2016
2 min

How to be Bayesian and spare yourself a dreadful afternoon with your stupid football team losing the derby

Yesterday was the second-last game of the Italian Serie A; I’ve been a Sampdoria supported since I was 12 \(-\) at that time, they were starting to become one of the best…
9 May, 2016
5 min

Workshop on Infectious Disease Modelling in Public Health Policy: Current status and challenges (again)

We’ve had a fantastic response to the workshop. In just a few days of public advertisement (I firstly posted about it and then advertised on allstat and HEALTHECON-ALL) we…
21 April, 2016
1 min

Workshop on Infectious Disease Modelling in Public Health Policy: Current status and challenges

Later this year, we’re holding at UCL a workshop on modelling for infectious disease with specific focus on the implications and challenges for health economic evaluation.
13 April, 2016
2 min

The internship

I’ve received a rather formal email (addressed to “Dear Prof Baio”!) by my good friend Andreas, asking me to advertise a position they have in the Dutch office of Mapi, a…
12 April, 2016
3 min

What’s my job again?

For quite some time now, Kobi (who’s just turned 4) has been kind of obsessed with Monster University. In fact, all he really cares about is one particular scene in which…
11 April, 2016
1 min

Speak for yourself

The scientific program is now FINAL, please check www.bayes-pharma.org for the detailed program.
9 April, 2016
1 min

Advanced Bayesian Modelling with BUGS course

This is a(nother!) short course on Bayesian statistics \(-\) it’s about advanced modelling using BUGS (not the one in the picture to the left, though…) and it’s being held…
7 April, 2016
1 min

Slightly off (by 26911)

I only half-listened to this story on More or Less earlier today, but I think it’s kind of amusing (if it wasn’t kind of sad for the implications it has…).
7 April, 2016
1 min

Italians do it better!

I’ve just spent a little over one hour to sort out my registration, travel and accommodation for the upcoming ISBA conference, later this year in Sardinia \(-\) well, I say…
14 March, 2016
1 min

Short course on Statistical Methods for the Value of Information Analysis

We’re now ready to start the advertisement for our short course on Statistical Methods for the Value of Information Analysis (I’ve posted about this here). The course will…
11 March, 2016
3 min

2 MSc Scholarships in Medical Statistics

Our department has just been awarded two NIHR MSc studentships in Medical Statistics. In fact, we’ve been successful in securing funds for the next 3 years (2 studentships…
10 March, 2016
2 min

Semi-finished

I’ve finally managed to have a reasonably functional release for SWSamp, my package for simulation-based sample size calculations, specifically (but not necessarily just!)…
3 March, 2016
1 min

Knitt(r)ing

One of the things that fills my Januaries and Februaries is the preparation of the in-course assessment (ICA) and final exam, for the course I teach at UCL.
16 February, 2016
2 min

Theta Rounds

Later this week, I’ll escape the cold British winter and flee to the even colder Canadian winter (-13 Celsius, I think!), to be in Toronto for a few days \(-\) I suppose I’m…
15 February, 2016
1 min

The aviator

To continue with the weirdest week in terms of emails, I have received one today that says:
11 February, 2016
1 min

Who do you think I am?

Today I’ve received an email inviting me to submit a paper to a scientific journal (it doesn’t really matter what journal it is, or whether or not my own work is actually…
10 February, 2016
1 min

The value of being informed about a short course

Later this year, Anna, Mark, Nicky and I will organise and then teach on a 3-day workshop on Statistical Methods for the Value of Information Analysis.
4 February, 2016
2 min

Young folks

We (as in Significance, in partnership with the Young Statisticians Section of the Royal Statistical Society) have just launched the 2016 Young Statisticians Writing…
3 February, 2016
1 min

I will survive!

Here’s a very long post, to make up for the recent silence on the blog… Lately, I’ve been working on a new project involving the use of survival analysis data and results…
25 January, 2016
6 min

The guide

Before and over the Christmas break, Christina and I have done some more work on our bmeta package, which I’ve already mentioned in another post, here \(-\) well, to be…
4 January, 2016
2 min

Post mortem

This is again a guest post, mainly written by Roberto, which I only slightly edited (and if significantly so, I am making it clear by adding text in italics and in square…
22 December, 2015
8 min

Political Forecasting Machine - The Spanish Edition

This is a (rather long, but I think equally interesting!) guest post by Roberto (he’s introducing himself below). We had already done some work on similar models a while back…
19 December, 2015
15 min

ERCIM/CMStat 2015

Tomorrow I’ll be at the 8th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics 2015), which has again come to London. I…
12 December, 2015
1 min

The Master plan

Together with Jolene (who’s really been the driving force behind this) and Marcos, I’ve been working in the past few months to try and set up a new _MSc in Health Economic…
12 December, 2015
2 min

Two peas in a pod

Earlier today I’ve seen this post about Frank Wilcoxon’s work on non-parametric statistics, on the Significance website. I’ve only very recently become involved in using…
7 December, 2015
1 min

Good value

Earlier today we had our workshop on the Value of Information at the Ispor conference. I think it went well \(-\) I counted about 80 people in the room, which was a big…
10 November, 2015
2 min

Milano 2

I’m not talking about this, but rather the curious, I’d say, coincidence that brings me to Milan for the second time in a matter of 4/5 months for a health economics…
7 November, 2015
1 min

More on stepped wedge

A couple of months back I talked at the launch of the Trial series on the Stepped Wedge Designed, on which I have worked together with a number of colleagues at UCL and LSHTM…
7 November, 2015
2 min

Bayes 2016

We’re finalising the details for our next Bayes Pharma conference \(-\) this time we’re going to Belgium, in Leuven.
30 October, 2015
1 min

Our new R package

As part of the work she’s doing for her PhD, Christina has done some (fairly major, I’d say!) review of the literature about prevalence studies on PCOS \(-\) that’s a rather…
29 October, 2015
2 min

Solicited

Quite a while ago, I have received an email by Samantha R. from Udemy pointing me towards this article, discussing the “difference between data science and statistics” (I…
20 October, 2015
3 min

Not so NICE…

Earlier today I caught this bit on the news \(-\) that’s the story of the latest NICE deliberation on ataluren a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. That’s a rare and…
16 October, 2015
2 min

PhDeidippides

Anthony (who’s doing good work in his PhD project) also doubles as a runner and has written a nice post for the Significance website.
6 October, 2015
1 min

Two PLOS Two

Cosetta Minelli and I have just published an editorial on PLOS Medicine on the use of the value of information, with particular reference to risk prediction modelling.
29 September, 2015
1 min

UCL Partners Biostatistics Network Symposium 2016

Although I formally figure as one of the organisers, this time around Joe Standing did most of the work \(-\) but I’m posting to advertise the next edition of the UCLP…
24 September, 2015
2 min

My compliments

I’ve been told of a nice review of BMHE in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics, by Patrick Graham. I was very pleased by the review. Particularly about a…
23 September, 2015
1 min

Roller poster

Last week, Anna was at the “Autumn Meeting on Latent Gaussian Models” in Trondheim (Norway), where she presented our work on using INLA to estimate the Expected Value of…
23 September, 2015
1 min

Launch(ed)

Today I spoke at the LSHTM Symposium on Stepped Wedge Trials about our work on sample size calculations based on simulations \(-\) it was organised to officially “launch”…
22 September, 2015
1 min

In my humble opinion…

The American Statistical Association have shared this picture on their Facebook page \(-\) I think the quote is brilliant!
15 September, 2015
1 min

Home alone

As Marta is heading to a conference, XY and I will spend a couple of days at home alone.
9 September, 2015
1 min

Aren’t you on holiday?

I’ve been very silent throughout the month of August \(-\) no single post, so far. The main reason for that is that we’ve moved home (although not very far from where we…
20 August, 2015
3 min

Job @ UCL

Here is the link for a new post recently advertised at UCL. The job is in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, but I think the idea is to try and bridge some…
20 August, 2015
1 min

Launch party

I think I’ve already mentioned this work here and here: after much tribulation, mostly due to the fact that we had to co-ordinate a relatively large number of papers in a…
27 July, 2015
4 min

The mathematics of love

I can’t remember how I came across this (I think I saw an article about it on Metro or something), but I got intrigued by Hannah Fry’s work on “The mathematics of love”. So…
17 July, 2015
2 min

Our short course

We’ve opened officially registration for our short course on Bayesian methods in health economics (this is a link to last year’s edition, with a little more information than…
16 July, 2015
1 min

The good the bad and the ugly

This is me kind of whining \(-\) although I do have some positive (and I think I’m right in whining).
15 July, 2015
2 min

Going to iHEA

iHEA’s conference is kind of big deal in health economics: it’s usually very big, with lots of sessions and lots of people participating. I have been to a few, both sides of…
11 July, 2015
1 min

Back to the future (or the day of the crises)

Yesterday was a very interesting day \(-\) not sure if “interesting” is the best word to describe it, but for now I’ll just use it…
8 July, 2015
3 min

Stress testing

Lately, we’ve been spending a lot of time “stress-testing” our method for the computation of the Expected Value of Partial Perfect Information (EVPPI \(-\) I know: the…
6 July, 2015
4 min

Back log

Last week I went to Madrid to examine a PhD (I’ve mentioned this in another post). The thesis was focussed on a mixture of computer science and health economics \(-\) in…
22 June, 2015
3 min

Job advert

This is an interesting post just advertised at Imperial College London by Marta.
22 June, 2015
2 min

Survival of the fittest (health economic model)

To make up for the fact that we’ve missed a couple of slots over the past months in our seminar series, we thought we organised a more structured event.
8 June, 2015
2 min

Video seminar

Later this week, I’m off to Madrid to examine a PhD candidate at UNED (that’s the Spanish Open University). This is interesting work on probabilistic network for health…
8 June, 2015
1 min

My talk @ the London Machine Learning Meetup

This Wednesday I’ve been invited to give a talk at the London Machine Learning Meetup \(-\) I don’t have a lot of experience of these meetings but I’m told that the audience…
1 June, 2015
1 min

Beta unblockers

A couple of weeks ago, we’ve uploaded the new version of BCEA on CRAN, to include the function implementing our method for the computation of the EVPPI based on INLA-SPDE \(-…
28 May, 2015
1 min

Bayes 2015

This week I’m in Basel for Bayes 2015. As usual lots of interesting talks and a very healthy mix of perspectives \(-\) if perhaps a bit less so than usual in terms of…
21 May, 2015
1 min

That time of the year…

Slightly later than last year, but, like every year, that time is coming. Yes: Eurovision again. From our point of view, it’s of course being a lot quieter than last year…
18 May, 2015
2 min

ICTM Conference

I’ve been asked to advertise the upcoming International Clinical Trial Methodology conference \(-\) this year it will be held in Glasgow. Oddly enough, this will be the…
13 May, 2015
1 min

Webinar

Yesterday, I have given a webinar (is it even how you say it? “give a webinar”? Anyway…). It was organised by Mapi and I spoke about using the analysis of the value of…
13 May, 2015
1 min

SPDEVPPI (2)

Following up on our paper, which I’ve mentioned in the previous post, we’ve also updated our BCEA package to implement our SPDE-INLA method for the computation of the EVPPI.…
2 May, 2015
1 min

SPDEVPPI

We’ve just arxived our paper on efficient computation for the Expected Value of Partial Perfect Information (EVPPI) based on SPDE-INLA. The EVPPI is a decision-theoretic…
25 April, 2015
2 min

There’s no I in Mutual

Today I’ve received an email from a prospective PhD candidate, who says that he (or she) would like to do his (or her) PhD under my supervision on a topic of mutual…
20 April, 2015
1 min

Stata goes Bayesian

The other day my colleague Gareth pointed out a very interesting piece of news. The new version of Stata is just out. Now I’m not a super-Stata user (although I think it’s a…
17 April, 2015
1 min

Conflict of interest

Disclaimer: I’m fully aware of the obvious conflict of interest here, but also I think that this looks really good, so I’ll write about it anyway.
13 April, 2015
1 min

Health economic combat

A couple of weeks ago we decided to create a more formal website for our research group within the department of Statistical Science at UCL.
9 April, 2015
1 min

Unsolicitors

This is probably just me being a bit grumpy, but I guess this happens to many people. I have just received an email (and it’s not the first time) from a random scientific…
7 April, 2015
1 min

House of stats

[This is a rather long joint post with Roberto Cerina and compounds our paper in the April 2015 issue of Significance]
31 March, 2015
10 min

Utility bills

Because I’m involved in many collaborative projects, some of which luckily involving LaTeX, and because I’m trying (sort-of succeeding) to spend as much time as possible…
19 March, 2015
2 min

Banned!

This is not really news any more, but I still think it’s an interesting story.
6 March, 2015
3 min

Cannabis on trial

The other night, Channel 4 has broadcast this programme. That’s some sort of spin-off from the trial we’re working on at UCL (Valerie Curran is the principal investigator \(-…
5 March, 2015
2 min

Non-trivial wedges

During February, I’ve been really bad at blogging \(-\) I’ve only posted one entry advertising our workshop at the RSS, later this month. I have spent a lot of time working…
1 March, 2015
2 min

GAS workshop

The General Application Section (GAS) of the Royal Statistical Society has asked us to reenact the session Richard Nixon, Chris Jackson and I did at Bayes Pharma last year on …
1 February, 2015
1 min

More than Word

I know this will sound childish and possibly snobbish. But for some reason (mostly because of several collaborative papers I’m working on at the moment with colleagues that…
30 January, 2015
1 min

A bunch of papers

The beginning of the new year has been particularly busy, as I’m working on several interesting projects. On the bright side, some of these are starting to give their fruits…
20 January, 2015
3 min

DIA Joint Adaptive Design and Bayesian Statistics Conference

This is my first real contribution to the ISBA Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics, in my new role of secretary. Our section has formally endorsed this ver…
19 January, 2015
1 min

No-go zones?

I think this is really serious: that’s the story of an “expert” on terrorism, who’s commented on Fox News about the situation in Europe. If you really want to laugh about…
12 January, 2015
2 min

Sabbath-ical

Today is the first day of my sabbatical term, which I have asked (and obtained) so I could work on writing the books \(-\) the BCEA book had been commissioned for a while…
5 January, 2015
2 min

Advance notice

As a few people have already inquired (more or less formally) about the next edition of the short course on Bayesian Methods in Health Economics, I thought it would be nice…
4 January, 2015
1 min

New Year’s fireworks

I have to thank Xi’an for this: as he rightly guesses in his comments to my original post (earlier this year \(-\) well, for a few more hours still, at least!), my spam…
31 December, 2014
2 min

Lazy(?)

It’s nearly the Christmas break and as I was writing the previous post (on our Workshop on cost-effectiveness thresholds), I just noticed the post-counter in the blog…
16 December, 2014
1 min

NICE and the cost-effectiveness thresholds: Can good intentions compensate for bad practice?

That’s the title of the workshop we’ve held at UCL yesterday (I’d mentioned it in a previous post). I think it went remarkably well (OK \(-\) as I’m the organiser I may be…
16 December, 2014
6 min

The smartest guys in the room

I’ve just finished reading this book, which tells the story of Enron, the American power company who raised to incredible fame and generated ridiculous amounts of money to…
7 December, 2014
2 min

Bayes Pharma 2015 - call for abstracts

The organisation of the next Bayes Pharma conference is in full swing. We’ve confirmed the invited speakers and finalised quite a few of the details too. We’ve now opened the …
28 November, 2014
1 min

Good intention/bad practice?

As part of the newly established Statistics/Health Economics seminars that our group is now organising at UCL, we are preparing a very exciting event for December 15th (so…
28 November, 2014
2 min

Another job

We have another job available in the Department of Statistical Science at UCL. This will be a joint post between the department and University College Hospital (we have…
18 November, 2014
1 min

Secretary

Second time lucky, I’ve just been elected Secretary of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics.
18 November, 2014
1 min

Best job ever

The job advert for the postdoc position in our MRC-funded project on the Regression Discontinuity Design is finally out.
14 November, 2014
1 min

How do you spell your name?

I’ve just got back from ISPOR, at which I managed to chat with several people \(-\) I guess that’s one of those conferences where the amount of people in the sessions is…
12 November, 2014
2 min

“Football”… I mean “soccer”… I mean “football”…

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by Daniel Weitzenfeld \(-\) a Chicago freelance data scientist (his own definition). Daniel got interested in modelling sports results…
29 October, 2014
2 min

ISPOR posters

As the short course is fast approaching and I’m fighting with the last organisational details, I spent most of today preparing the two posters for the ISPOR congress, which…
27 October, 2014
1 min

1 in 5 million

Earlier today, I’ve got an email from UCL Library Services, telling me that our research publications repository (UCL Discovery) has “recently passed the exciting milestone…
14 October, 2014
1 min

Bayes of thrones

My friend and colleague Andreas sent me a link to a working paper published by a statistician at the University of Christchurch (New Zealand) and discussed here. The main…
5 October, 2014
1 min

Evil companies stereotypes and coffee

A couple of weeks ago, our favourite coffee place in Walton (where we live) just closed out of the blue. We were really surprised as we thought they were doing really well…
5 October, 2014
2 min

Book of the year

The next issue of Significance (it will be a December double issue) will feature a festive version of the usual book review section.
24 September, 2014
1 min

Mini-tour

The last two days have been kind of a very interesting mini-tour for me \(-\) yesterday the Symposium that we organised at UCL (the picture on the left is not a photo taken…
19 September, 2014
1 min

BCEA 2.1

We’re about to release the new version of BCEA, which will contain some major changes.
17 September, 2014
1 min

B my J

As part of our work on the Regression Discontinuity Design for the British Journal of Medicine, we decided we should prepare a short, introductory research paper. We weren’t…
8 September, 2014
1 min

Unbelievable(?)

This is an old story (it dates back to July last year) but it just got under my radar and I think it’s quite unbelievable \(-\) or may be it isn’t after all…
8 September, 2014
1 min

No surprises

Yesterday was the day of my talk at the RSS Conference. As I mentioned here, I hadn’t been back to Sheffield for nearly 20 years, so it is really no no surprise that I found…
4 September, 2014
2 min

RSSheffield

Next week I’m off to the RSS conference in Sheffield, where I’ll present our work on the Eurovision contest. I’m quite excited about going back to Sheffield, where some time…
27 August, 2014
1 min

Workshop on Efficient Methods for Value of Information

Nicky Welton has invited me to talk at a very interesting workshop, which she has organised at the University of Bristol (here’s a flyer). The day will be about the recent…
20 August, 2014
1 min

(Some) Spaces available

Requests for registration to our short course on Bayesian methods in Health Economics are coming in steadily \(-\) in fact, we had started advertising quite in advance (the…
14 August, 2014
1 min

Two weights and two measures?

This is an interesting story about the Meningitis B vaccine (some additional background here and here). In a nutshell the main issue is that vaccines are subject to a…
11 August, 2014
2 min

Pat pat

This is probably akin to an exercise in self-pleasing, but I’ll indulge in this anyway to celebrate the fact that our paper on the Bias in the Eurovision song contest voting…
25 July, 2014
1 min

The Oracle (8) - let’s go all the way!

This is (may be) the final post in the series dedicated to the prediction of the World Cup results \(-\) I’ll try and actually write another to wrap things up and summarise…
7 July, 2014
3 min

The Oracle (7)

We’re now down to 8 teams left in the World Cup. Interestingly, despite a pretty disappointing display by some of the (more or less rightly so) highly rated teams, such as…
3 July, 2014
4 min

Short course: Bayesian methods in health economics

Chris, Richard and I tested this last March in Canada (see also here) and things seem to have gone quite well. So we have decided to replicate the experiment (so that we can…
2 July, 2014
2 min

Break!

Just to break the mono-thematic nature of the recent posts, I thought I’d just linked to this article which has appeared in the Significance website.
28 June, 2014
2 min

The Oracle (6)

Quick update, now that the group stage is finished. We needed a few tweaks to the simulation process (described in some more details here), which we spent some time debating…
27 June, 2014
2 min

The Oracle (5. Or: Calibration calibration calibration…)

First off, a necessary disclaimer: I haven’t been able to write this post before a few of the games of the final round of the group stage have been played, but I have not…
23 June, 2014
5 min

The Oracle (4)

As promised, some consideration of our model performance, so far. I’ve produced the graph below, which for each of the first 16 games (_ie _the games it took for all the 32…
19 June, 2014
4 min

The Oracle (3)

Yesterday was the end of round 1 for the group stage \(-\) this means that all 32 teams have played at least once (in fact, Brazil and Mexico have now played twice). So, it…
18 June, 2014
4 min

The Oracle (2)

The World Cup is now under way, after an arguably fairly lacklustre performance by the host against a tough (if possibly a bit naive) Croatian team, still resulting in a 3-1…
13 June, 2014
2 min

The Oracle (1)

This is the first follow up to our previous, (slightly technical and detailed) post on the World Cup prediction. First off a quick and simplified recap on the model and then…
10 June, 2014
6 min

At the Copa

This is the first post of a fairly regular series (at least I’ll try to keep it this way!), dedicated to the impending FIFA World Cup (you may think I’ve gone all Barry…
9 June, 2014
7 min

Enjoy the silence

I’ve been quite silent on the blog in the past few weeks \(-\) a combination of exam-marking, conference-organisation and other few (some more, some less interesting) things…
8 June, 2014
2 min

History hour

This is kind of cool \(-\) that’s an article by Joseph Mazur, appeared in The Guardian with a very brief (but interesting) discussion of the origin of mathematical symbols.…
21 May, 2014
1 min

RSS Young Statisticians Writing Competition

Significance and the Young Statisticians Section of the Royal Statistical Society host an annual competition to promote and encourage top-class writing about statistics.…
13 May, 2014
1 min

Priorities

I like the way Channel 4 news prioritise their stories (that’s their homepage as of 12.06PM \(-\) below the one about Mrs President Obama, but above the one about Mr…
10 May, 2014
1 min

UCL Biostats Network Symposium 3

We’ve finalised the line up for the next UCL Biostatistics Network Symposium on “Contemporary Statistical Methods in Medical Research“.
8 May, 2014
1 min

In the media

Yesterday, UCL News Office issued this press release which mentions our (that’s Marta and me) paper on the Eurovision contest, which has just been published in the Journal…
2 May, 2014
3 min

On demand (but on a very serious topic)

My friend Virgilio has posted this on his Facebook page and invited me to comment. It is an article by a Spanish cardiologist that tells the story of a patient who has…
2 May, 2014
2 min

Ground-breaking!?

My friend Natalia has posted a link to this blog on her Facebook profile. Basically this is the story of a paper published in 1994 in the medical journal Diabetes Care.
27 April, 2014
2 min

Bayes Pharma 2014 - final programme

Here’s the finalised programme for Bayes Pharma. (Of course I may be biased), but I think it is quite interesting and we have a wide variety of topics, so there should be…
25 April, 2014
3 min

Books & roses (& chatty taxi-drivers)

I knew that Wednesday was el dia de San Jordi but I hadn’t realised the way in which Catalans celebrate it.
25 April, 2014
2 min

My talks @ Universitat de Girona

Just after Easter, I’ll go for a very quick trip to lovely Girona, where Marc Saez has invited me to give two talks.
18 April, 2014
1 min

The Granville incident

Earlier this morning, there was some commotion on the allstat mailing list (if you don’t know what it is, that’s a UK-based discussion list specifically focussed on…
16 April, 2014
2 min

Bayes Pharma 2014 - nearly there…

We’re nearly done with (most of) the preparation for Bayes Pharma 2014. We’ve received quite a few abstracts for the contributed talks \(-\) many different topics but in…
14 April, 2014
1 min

Causal Inference in Health Economic and Social Sciences

The programme of the forthcoming UK Causal Inference Meeting ”Causal Inference in Health, Economic and Social Sciences” is just out. The short conference will be at the end…
14 April, 2014
1 min

Seven (a-day)

This week (among other things, including my Vespa breaking down twice in three days) I was busy taking part in an interview panel for a research associate position, together…
6 April, 2014
1 min

The sampling frame is a list but not every list is a sampling frame

Yesterday and today, I spent some time marking the in-course assessment (ICA) for my course (the teaching term is over next week \(-\) yay!).
21 March, 2014
2 min

Canada et al

Today was the first day of our course on Bayesian methods in health economics. After my lecture on intro to health economics, Chris has given 2 lectures on Bayesian methods…
13 March, 2014
2 min

Man at work(-ish)

Perhaps one could argue that the obvious, manly activity to do at the weekend when you’re home alone is to put and organise stuff in the garage. Well, I was home alone last…
10 March, 2014
2 min

Money(proper foot)ball?

This is an interesting (although a bit overused, of late) topic. In some quarters, we statisticians are all akin to “moneyballs” (by the way: I should say I haven’t read the…
9 March, 2014
1 min

Issue with thinning in R2OpenBUGS vs R2jags

While preparing the practicals for our course at the University of Alberta, I’ve discovered something kind of interesting. I’m sure this is nothing new and actually people…
3 March, 2014
2 min

Fun with flags

The Scotland independence referendum is approaching (relatively fast), and so are all sorts of related, very important issues, like what would the new UK flag be, if…
2 March, 2014
1 min

More statins for everybody!

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) says in draft guidance which now goes out to consultation that the threshold for GPs to prescribe statins to…
15 February, 2014
1 min

Sure thing principle

I’ve been a bit busy lately \(-\) teaching, plus other more or less interesting things (well: some really interesting, some much less so) \(-\) and thus I haven’t really…
13 February, 2014
1 min

Mugged

Rasmus posted a couple of comments on my Christmas-present mug and apparently has started a collection of his own. But, then again, I think the mug galore has hit hard on…
8 February, 2014
1 min

BMHE @ University of Alberta (reds vs blues)

When I was a kid, we use to play Subbuteo all the time (in fact, my brother and I had this exact box, featuring Sampdoria on the cover \(-\) I thought I just mentioned this…
4 February, 2014
2 min

LaTeX can be arsey but boy is it good?!

I have been using LaTeX since I wrote my BSc thesis (that was way back in the last century \(-\) although I’m saying this just for dramatic effect, but I’m not THAT old!)…
30 January, 2014
3 min

BMHE & BCEA get a shout in published paper

Panagiotis Petrou has posted a link to a recent paper of his, which develops a cost-effectiveness analysis of a drug used as a second-line treatment of renal carcinoma. The…
15 January, 2014
1 min

Job @ UCD

This is an interesting job opportunity \(-\) Mark (this is his UCL webpage, although he’s now officially transitioned to Warwick) has pointed this out to me, and I thought I…
13 January, 2014
1 min

Porn capital of the porn nation

The other day I was having a quick look at the newspapers and I stumbled on this article. Apparently, Pornhub (a website whose mission should be pretty clear) have analysed…
10 January, 2014
2 min

Bayes 2014 coming up nicely!

Today I had a very useful teleconference with the other members of the organising committee for the Bayes Pharma 2014 conference. The new website is already up and running…
8 January, 2014
1 min

New year new cost-effectiveness thresholds?

Karl Claxton and colleagues at the University of York have recently published a working paper on Methods for the Estimation of the NICE Cost Effectiveness Threshold. Since a…
8 January, 2014
2 min

Significant news

Good news on the second day back to work after the Christmas break: I’ve been invited to join the Editorial Board of the Significance magazine \(-\) of course I have happily…
7 January, 2014
1 min

Open access

I was really impressed by the very smooth process through which my paper on cost-effectiveness analysis in the presence of structural zero costs (which I’ve already…
17 December, 2013
2 min

Christmas came early (or who’s the geekiest in the family?)

By pure accident (honest! I didn’t do it on purpose!), last week I opened a package that had come in the post for Marta. Too bad that, of all the packages I could have…
16 December, 2013
1 min

Death of a statistician from Surbiton

This morning I heard from Christian the news that Dennis Lindley has passed away, last Saturday. He was 90. I think I’d already linked to this video in a different post, but…
16 December, 2013
1 min

Last (talk before) Christmas

OK, so first things first. I’ve always: 1) been a huge fan of the reindeer hat; 2) wondered what George Michael had actually given as a present to the other guy (if…
9 December, 2013
2 min

Update on Bayes Pharma 2014

This is the logo for the 2014 edition of Bayes Pharma. Very soon we’ll advertise the programme and more details \(-\) I’ll post about it as well.
8 December, 2013
1 min

Newest release of BCEA

Very shortly, I’ll upload the newest release of BCEA, my R package to post-process the output of a (Bayesian) health economic model and produce systematic summaries (such as…
2 December, 2013
3 min

Lost

The results of the ISBA elections have come out and unfortunately, I’ve been beaten to the post of programme chair for the Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical…
30 November, 2013
1 min

My talk at the LSHTM

Yesterday I gave a talk on our RDD project at the Centre for Statistical Methodology of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. While presenting me, Karla (the…
30 November, 2013
1 min

PSMR 2014

Registration for the short course on Practical Statistics for Medical Research (PSMR) 2014 are now open. Here is the advert we’ve published on the BMJ with all the relevant…
27 November, 2013
1 min

BCEs0 version 1.1 on CRAN

As I was responding to the points raised by two referees and the editor on my paper on cost-effectiveness with structural zeros (the preliminary version was here, while I…
16 November, 2013
3 min

Loophole

I think I should thank Marta (again!) for this post, as she made me think about it while we were riding together to the Stan workshop, in one of our now (“A XY”, that is, as…
14 November, 2013
1 min

Imperialstan

Despite the map here, I’m not going to talk about yet another fraction of the former Soviet Empire which is taken the form of a people’s republic, possibly with witty British …
11 November, 2013
2 min

Keynote speaker

Earlier today, I was trying to finish preparing the poster for the Clinical Trials Methodology Conference \(-\) I’ll have both the poster presentation (on the Expected Value…
9 November, 2013
1 min

Rescue remedy

Interesting day, today. I woke up really early (3.45am) to catch my flight to Amsterdam to give my talk at the Chemometrics Workshop. The cab got me to the airport early…
7 November, 2013
4 min

Bayesian Biostatistics 2014

This has to do with the ISBA Biostats section (I suppose it will be even more, if I am elected to the post of Program Chair, but I’ll try and be involved even if I don’t…
5 November, 2013
2 min

Typos in BMHE

No matter how many times you check and no matter how good the publishers are, I’m guessing there’s no way out of getting typos in a publication, especially if it’s a…
5 November, 2013
2 min

My talk @ the Dutch Chemometrics Symposium

For same reason, Paul Eilers really liked the talk I gave on INLA at the BayesPharma workshop earlier this year and so he invited me to talk at the Dutch Chemometrics…
4 November, 2013
1 min

Fellow me

Last summer I have applied for a NIHR Research Methods fellowship. Earlier this week the results have come out and they have liked my proposal, which is of course great news.
29 October, 2013
2 min

Bad teacher(s)

This morning there has been some frenzy on the UK media (eg here or here) after the publication of a pamphlet by David Willetts, a junior minister for University and Science…
21 October, 2013
2 min

The Big Bayes theorem theory

While we were eating a forkful of what was supposed to be a frittata, but turned out to be very fluffy mushroom scrambled eggs earlier, we were half watching an episode of Th…
21 October, 2013
1 min

R2jags & BCEA (& the examples from BMHE)

Recently, Yu-Sung Su and Masanao Yajima, the developers of the R2jags package, have released a new version (the current one is 0.03-11). As far as I understand it, one of…
19 October, 2013
2 min

Le Tour

Today I’ve given the talk on the model for structural zeros and the related R package BCEs0 for the third time in three weeks (this time it was at the London School of…
16 October, 2013
2 min

Election night(s)

The 2013 ISBA elections are finally underway! From today (and until November 15th) members will be able to cast their vote for several posts, by simply visiting this webpage.
15 October, 2013
1 min

Road trip

Today I had a meeting for one of the projects in which I’m involved. This is a big research grant (in which I have a marginal role, to be honest), with the aim of evaluating…
15 October, 2013
1 min

Self-syndication

This is a piece I’ve written for The SWITCH project website. SWITCH is a research project addressing issues related to the social market economy in Europe. The topics…
11 October, 2013
3 min

The (third) runway bride

I think I should disclaim the conflict of interest in this one (since Marta is one of the authors of the paper), but it was really, really cool to see her study on the…
9 October, 2013
1 min

Happy birthday

Sylvia Richardson (who’s now the head of the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge, and part of our RDD project) asks me to advertise the MRC Biostatistic Unit‘s Centenary…
8 October, 2013
1 min

Video killed the radio stars

Francisco tells me that they have uploaded my talk (which I gave last week in ULPGC). I haven’t seen it all, but the bit I did see is not too bad, I thought… Check it out!
8 October, 2013
1 min

Nice & weird people in the Canary island (oh: I went there for work too!)

The past one has been a very interesting week, which I’ve spent visiting the University of Las Palmas, in the Canary Island. Since it was the last week on maternity leave…
6 October, 2013
4 min

My talk @ GSK

This Thursday I’ll give a talk at the GSK Statistics Forum. Erika (with whom I shared a train journey to the 2012 BayesPharma and a group walk in Oxfordshire a few years…
24 September, 2013
1 min

You stole my idea!

Earlier today, Gareth has showed me a recent, interesting paper by Michael Sweeting (and colleagues). In the paper, Micheal et al describe their work on a R package to…
24 September, 2013
1 min

Parum PI

A couple of weeks ago, the MRC-funded research project on the Regression Discontinuity Design (of which I’m the Principal Investigator) has officially started, so I thought…
20 September, 2013
2 min

Attendance in parliament (in Italy)

Earlier today, I found some interesting data on Italian MPs voting records in the current parliament (which was opened last April). The data are available for both Houses…
16 September, 2013
4 min

BCEA in UseR!

In a recent post, I had hinted at big news for BCEA \(-\) I thought it was pretty much a done deal, but because it wasn’t yet set in stone, I didn’t want to jinx it…
13 September, 2013
2 min

Biostatistics seminar

As part of the activities of the UCL Biostatistics Network, we organise regular seminars, to which we invite (usually relatively local \(-\) for budget reasons only!)…
10 September, 2013
2 min

Jobs @ UCL

Irene (who, among other things, is one of the co-apps in the RDD project \(-\) in fact, she’ll be a fundamental part of the research!) sent me a couple of job adverts for…
8 September, 2013
2 min

Program chair

The other day, Julien asked me if I wanted to run for program chair of the ISBA Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics, of which I am a member.
8 September, 2013
2 min

Visitors

I wasn’t really a great fan of the show when I was growing up, and I also think (hope!) that the picture is not fitting to what I’m about to say…
3 September, 2013
2 min

The desertification of the NHS

The peerless Daily Mail reports today with its usual sobriety that “thousands are dying of thirst on NHS”.
28 August, 2013
1 min

Champions league

Before I even start any real writing here, I should remark that I am most definitely not an Inter Milan fan (but they are my brother’s and dad’s team, so I thought I used…
21 August, 2013
1 min

Rock’n’roll stars

We’re spending a few days in the Tuscan seaside. But both Marta and I seem to have lost the Italian genes in us and can barely tolerate the hot weather \(-\) XY is not too…
17 August, 2013
2 min

No octagon!

One silly thing I really like about Canada is their street sign for “no stopping” \(-\) it always makes me think that Canadians really dislike octagons and are not ashamed…
7 August, 2013
5 min

Don’t cry for me Argentina

Well, I had a very good run; but I knew sooner or later it had to end, and end it did…
4 August, 2013
2 min

BCEA 2.0

I know that updating a package too often is not quite good practice, so, given we’ve released BCEA 1.3-1 just about a month ago, this is way too soon to move forward. But…
28 July, 2013
4 min

JSM 2013

Next week I’ll head to the Joint Statistical Meeting(the annual conference of the American Statistical Association), which funnily enough this year will be held in beautiful…
24 July, 2013
2 min

Mugatu is a health economist

When Hansel comes out to save the day preventing “Derek [Zoolander]_ to off the prime minister of Micronesia_”, the evil Jacobim Mugatu says “It’s that damn Hansel – He’s so…
22 July, 2013
2 min

BCEs0

BCEs0 is the new R package I’ve written \(-\) well, nearly finished to, anyway; it should be ready in version 1.0 in the next few days. The acronym stands for Bayesian…
20 July, 2013
1 min

Interview

Apparently, while at the next JSM in Montreal (in which I’ll present some work on the RDD project \(-\) of course, the talk is still far from being written, but scheduled…
17 July, 2013
1 min

Zero to hero

Recently, I’ve been working on a paper, which I think is coming along nicely. The basic problem is like this: in a health economic evaluation, sometimes data are collected…
13 July, 2013
3 min

Day out in Bristol (2)

PS (to the previous post): [I’m assuming] during a break from taking care of her own XX, Silvia points out that the graffiti in the picture here is nothing less than an…
5 July, 2013
1 min

Day out in Bristol

Long day, today, as I went to Bristol for a workshop on the expected value of information, specifically for health economic evaluation.
4 July, 2013
1 min

Plan B

Thank goodness, I think that even if this statistician business turns out badly, I can still make a living with rafting (if only by begging for money, in exchange for…
3 July, 2013
2 min

Bayes 250 - as it happened

I was going to post some impressions on the two-day Bayes 250 conference, but Christian beat me to it with his perfect recollection of the event. I thought it was a good…
21 June, 2013
1 min

The pretender

Tonight I’ll pretend to still be very, very young and go catch a Ryanair flight from Stansted, so that I can be all revenge-y at my brother’s stag do, tomorrow morning.
21 June, 2013
1 min

BCEA 1.3.0

After months of work (although to be fair, we haven’t worked 100% full time on this), Andrea and I are nearly ready to publish the next release of BCEA.
18 June, 2013
3 min

Big in Japan

Inspired by this post on R-bloggers, I decided to check how BCEA was doing. Unfortunately, it does not feature in the top 100 most downloaded R packages. However, I think…
13 June, 2013
2 min

Running time

Marta and I are doing some re-analysis of our Eurovision contest (some context here and here). We have slightly modified our original model (mostly, I have navigated the…
10 June, 2013
2 min

You sure Mike?

Holly Baxter writes an interesting article on the Michael Douglas/HPV story (widely covered in the past few days: eg here, here or here) in today’s Guardian, in which she…
5 June, 2013
2 min

Daily bias in the mail

David Spiegelhalter writes in his blog about this news headline on the Daily Mail (DM)’s website. According to the article, statins can weaken muscle and joints, raising the…
4 June, 2013
2 min

UseR 2013

Although the programme is quite interesting, I am not really involved in this conference (in fact I’m not even going \(-\) even though, sometimes, I think it would be nice…
4 June, 2013
1 min

Simpson gets married (and divorced?)

While I was waiting for my coffee this morning, I flipped through the newspapers on one of the tables in my local coffee place when my eye got caught by this article in The…
24 May, 2013
3 min

Bayes Pharma 2013 (4)

The conference is officially over and the breaking news is that I have managed to succeed where the lot in the picture right next to this miserably failed. Somehow they lost…
23 May, 2013
1 min

Bayes Pharma 2013 (3)

Another very interesting day. The highlight of the morning was, in my opinion, David Ohlssen’s talk. David is with Novartis US and has discussed a few issues related with…
22 May, 2013
1 min

Bayes Pharma 2013 (2)

The first day of the conference was quite good, I thought. I was pleased with the audience’s response to my talk and also the other talks were quite good. The level is even…
21 May, 2013
1 min

Bayes Pharma 2013 (1)

Earlier today, I’ve arrived in Rotterdam for the Bayes Pharma conference. As I already said in a previous post, I think we have quite an exciting line up. In fact, I think…
20 May, 2013
1 min

Handouts & Beamer

While preparing the slides for my talk at Bayes2013 next week, I stumbled on a slight LaTeX problem. Creating the talk with overlays is easy and the results are really good.…
13 May, 2013
1 min

Alternative diseases

Yesterday we took XY for his first gelato in Richmond (to be fair he’d already tried some ice cream but that wasn’t quite the same experience…). In the last couple of years…
7 May, 2013
1 min

What the BBC isn’t telling you

Yesterday Gareth pointed me to this article on the BBC website. The underlying story has to do with Meredith Kercher’s murder and the subsequent trial involving mainly her…
30 April, 2013
5 min

Posteriors vs predictives

Karl Saliba writes with some queries about our football paper, which I have already discussed on the blog here. He says:
26 April, 2013
4 min

Russian dolls

This is a bit of a Russian doll situation, because I’m effectively pointing to another blog, which (kind of) points to this blog (and, who knows, may be this blog is somehow…
23 April, 2013
1 min

Most squares

Sometimes you try really hard to ask interesting questions, so that people think that you’re clever and interesting too, that you actually don’t realise how dumb you’re…
19 April, 2013
2 min

Health economics and sex workers

Today, the British media (eg here) have given some attention to a report commissioned by Westminster council into the condition of sex workers, with particular reference to…
12 April, 2013
3 min

Boomerang

Not sure if I’m giving away some good trick here, but I thought I’d shared my experience with this add on for gmail. Once installed, Boomerang allows you to schedule emails…
8 April, 2013
1 min

Petty in pink

I have to admit that in some sense I am being petty here. But I also think that this story is actually quite interesting, so I’m posting about it.
2 April, 2013
2 min

Bayes 250

Of course, a Bayes 500 would be even better and more powerful (although more fuel-consuming…). But: the best we can afford (strictly for time constraints \(-\) time since…
26 March, 2013
1 min

Suit up! (which I didn’t)

Yesterday I was “interviewed” by Panagiotis Petrou who is working within the EU project Adapting European health systems to diversity (ADAPT). [He did suit up for the…
14 March, 2013
2 min

Job advert

We finally got around to prepare everything we needed to advertise the position which will be available in the MRC grant we’ve been awarded last year.
12 March, 2013
1 min

Fun day

Today I spent the morning reading a PhD thesis that I need to examine (scheduled for next month) and the afternoon marking in-course assessment (ICA) papers for my course…
8 March, 2013
2 min

PSMR (short course at UCL)

As every year come April our group hold a short course on Practical Statistics in Medical Research. I think this has run for several years now and it’s reasonably…
8 March, 2013
1 min

Making friends

I’ve received an email by one of the contributors of statisticsblog.com and, while we were both hanging out of our parents’ back, we’ve decided we wanted to become friends.
6 March, 2013
2 min

Bayes2013

Last year Julien invited me to the Bayes-Pharma workshop in Aachen, which turned out to be quite nice.
5 March, 2013
2 min

Culling vs Vaccinating?

I’ve blogged about this when I saw Christl Donnelly’s talk at the UCL Symposium last year (in a nutshell the idea is that badgers are potentially responsible for infecting…
27 February, 2013
2 min

Oh what’s the point?

I think this is one of the most interesting things about the Italian elections. In the following, I’ve listed the main parties. There are 12 (you could include some more…
27 February, 2013
2 min

Organic cannabis

Yesterday I went to the kick-off meeting of a grant I’m involved in. I think it’s quite interesting for a couple of reasons: first the content matter.
20 February, 2013
2 min

Fizzy tax

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has just put out a set of recommendations to tackle the obesity crisis in the UK where “1 in 4 adults are classified as obese” \(-\) as…
18 February, 2013
1 min

… and we’re back!

To be finally back from Mali is kind of weird. It’s good, of course. In fact it’s great, because I think we were all ready to be back to our more “normal” life. But it’s…
4 February, 2013
4 min

A few things I learned…

Here’s a quick list:
19 January, 2013
2 min

(Dis)Utility

Mart Janssen writes me that he’s tried to run the examples for BCEA and pointed out a problem \(-\) it all boiled down to a missing script, really, but thanks Mart (if…
13 January, 2013
1 min

Quiet Saturday

Today we were allowed to go around Bamako’s centre. Even in the morning there was no demonstration and the mood seems much more relaxed among the Malians. We tried to get a…
12 January, 2013
1 min

Happy new year

Admittedly, quite late, but we’ve been quite busy in the last few days… We’re still in Mali, waiting for XY’s paperwork to be finalised. The process in itself is quite…
10 January, 2013
2 min

XY

For a while, I thought that the best personal news of the year was the book; until this happened, that is…
31 December, 2012
1 min

Italian elections (1)

You’d think that the last week before the holidays would be very quiet and not much would be going on. Well, if you did, you’d be wrong, I guess, as the last few days have…
19 December, 2012
3 min

Nataniele Argento

Effectively, the Italian election campaign is already in full swing, so I tried to start collecting some data to see what we are about to face. If I have time and manage to…
13 December, 2012
4 min

Thriller (or the return of the living dead?)

As it turns out, another Italian government is about to end, as Professor-turned-Prime Minister Mario Monti has resigned, following former PM Silvio Berlusconi’s party…
9 December, 2012
2 min

Seminar next week

As part of the UCL Biostatistics Network, we have what sounds like a very good seminar lined up for next week (Tuesday 11th December, 4pm; Drayton B20 Jevons Lecture Theatre …
4 December, 2012
2 min

Marking your own homework

I quite like the way in which Brian Leveson (who has led the famous public inquiry into the media, in the UK) has summarised his recommendations: you guys [ie the press/media]…
30 November, 2012
1 min

Grant (and missing data)

Today has been quite an interesting day. First of all, we finally heard from the MRC and we got the Grant! (I actually mean money to do our research on the regression…
27 November, 2012
2 min

The perks (and quirks) of being a referee

The other day I was talking to a friend at work, who was rather annoyed that one of his papers had been rejected by a journal, given the negative comments of the reviewers.…
25 November, 2012
4 min

No junk mail please

The last two comments I received (on this post) were quite odd. Somebody has left a comment saying something like “Thanks! Good to see an update” and then a link to some…
24 November, 2012
1 min

(Nearly) sold out

The other day I have spoken with the publisher who told me that the book is officially out in the US; usually it takes a few weeks to stock in Europe, so it’ll probably be…
17 November, 2012
1 min

Porn economics?

Since it’s Saturday and Marta is on holiday at IKEA with her mum this morning I took it really easy [NB:_ wait until you read the whole thing before you judge me from the…
17 November, 2012
4 min

When in Rome…

Yesterday I was in Rome to teach in a short course on Bayesian methods in health economics.
15 November, 2012
4 min

You can’t play a broken link

Just like James Morrison and Nelly Furtado say, you really can’t play a broken string. And quite similarly, you just can’t use a broken link.
12 November, 2012
1 min

Gotcha!

I should start this with a disclaimer, ie that I’m not really claiming any “success” with this post. But I find it quite interesting that the estimations I produced with this…
7 November, 2012
2 min

Mapping in health economics

Last Friday, I went to one of the health economics seminars that are organised at UCL; the format that is used is that one of the people in the group suggests a paper…
5 November, 2012
3 min

Hand picking

Yesterday we were out with our friends; we met for a drink late in the afternoon and spent quite some time trying to figure out what we wanted to eat.
4 November, 2012
2 min

(B)AIES

Francesco and Andrea have asked me to join them in doing a short course before the conference of the Italian Health Economics Association (AIES). The course is about…
31 October, 2012
1 min

Cox & Mayo

One of my favourite Friends episodes is when Joey finally has a breakthrough and gets his first starring role in the show “Mac & Cheese” (in fact the robot was called…
31 October, 2012
4 min

More football

Given that Sampdoria have lost their fourth game in a row, I am not really interested in football any more (as of yesterday, I actually find it a very boring game and think…
29 October, 2012
2 min

Ben pharma

Quite regularly, Marta comes up with some idea to reshuffle something around the house (eg move furniture around, or change the way things are). Normally, mostly because I…
25 October, 2012
4 min

Bayes for President!

I couldn’t resist getting sucked into the hype associated with the US election and debates, and so I thought I had a little fun of my own and played around a bit with the…
23 October, 2012
8 min

Thank you for smoking (and also doing take-away)

Sometimes you watch a movie from the 1980s or something and they have this weird “hidden adverts”, mostly about cigarettes \(-\) things like when the camera indulges on the…
22 October, 2012
4 min

Badger calling

I was thinking of posting some thoughts on the talk that Christl Donnelly gave yesterday at the Symposium (in fact I briefly commented on a previous post here). As it…
19 October, 2012
4 min

Scotland don’t leave us!

Last Saturday we went to the BBC to be part of the audience in a recording for a radio show. That’s something we quite often do, since Marta discovered that you just need to…
17 October, 2012
2 min

Willy Wonga & the money factory

Yesterday I was reading this story, which I think is kind of interesting. Apparently the fact that Wonga (a “high interest, short-term payday loan company”) has signed a…
11 October, 2012
2 min

Laplace’s liberation army

Great as it is, Google does not always give the “best”, or “right” (ie “most appropriate”) results on a given search. For example, if you google “jags” (using google.co.uk)…
8 October, 2012
2 min

Turin break

It often happens that a band are quite popular for a bit and then sort of disappear from your radar (or actually, pretty much anybody’s radar).
8 October, 2012
3 min

What I should really blog about

I’ve just seen that, as of today (I think, given I haven’t checked the blog over the weekend), this is the most read post in the blog. It has taken over from another post…
8 October, 2012
2 min

Goldacre mine

During a quick break between meetings, I’ve watched Ben Goldacre’s new TED lecture. I met Ben when he gave a talk at the final conference of the Evidence project (in which I…
3 October, 2012
2 min

Ordinal football

I’ve had a quick look at this article on R-bloggers \(-\) I don’t think I’ve followed the whole exchange, but I believe they have discussed what models should/could be…
1 October, 2012
3 min

The nineties are not cost-effective

After a few errands, this afternoon I took Marta to the station (on her way to meeting some friends in London) and got back at home to prepare my presentation for next week…
29 September, 2012
2 min

Making babies with Markov models

In the last couple of weeks we’ve been hard at work to extend the HPV model. In the original version, we were considering a cohort of 280 thousand 12 years old “virtual…
28 September, 2012
2 min

Twitter Economics

I think I’ve spent far too much time trying to find a suitable picture to go with this post (but I have to say I’m very happy with the final output!). Anyway: this is…
25 September, 2012
2 min

Mixed treatment counterfactual Obama

While I was working on something completely unrelated to this, last Friday I came across a paper by Simon Jackman; I’ve known of his work for a few years (for example, I…
23 September, 2012
3 min

Twinned

As of yesterday, I think, this blog is officially “twinned” with R-bloggers (this shouldn’t be too surprising, seeing that they have been in my blogroll for a while).
19 September, 2012
1 min

INLA functions (yet again)

This links back to previous posts here and here. Earlier today, I had a quick chat with Michela (by email, actually) on this topic. In particular, she was trying to use the…
17 September, 2012
2 min

BCEA examples

I’ve prepared a document (which I’ve put on the website here, together with some scripts at this page) which I think is helpful, if you’re trying to work out BCEA. I have…
13 September, 2012
2 min

League (kitchen) table

Yesterday we met our friend Paolo after work. We hadn’t seen him for a while, so it was nice to catch up. We were in Soho and we ended up having a bite in this little place (…
12 September, 2012
2 min

ISBA/BioPharm

The new section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics of ISBA has just been established. It’s quite an interesting idea and aims at bringing together statisticians…
11 September, 2012
1 min

Domino effect

I had quickly read something about this on the papers earlier today, and tonight I saw the episode of Dispatches, presenting the “school dinner scandal”. There are several…
10 September, 2012
3 min

INLA functions (continued)

I have polished up one of the two functions I’ve thought of implementing for INLA and it’s now available in the development version of the R package. So if you’ve got INLA…
10 September, 2012
4 min

Run keeping to keep running

To keep up with the Olympic spirit, and on Marta’s insistence, I think I’ve started doing some running. I’ve gone twice in a week: last Saturday we first went to Kent to…
9 September, 2012
2 min

Olympic graduation

I’ve had a very intense day, yesterday. First, I went to the graduation ceremony. The main event was in Bedford Square Gardens.
5 September, 2012
3 min

Old habits…

While riding into work this morning, I was at a traffic light in Fulham, when I noticed the curious sign on the number plate of the scooter in front of me.
3 September, 2012
1 min

Stan

I don’t mean the weirdo that locks his girlfriend in the boot of his car and drives into a river, after having dyed his hair so he looks like that other weirdo Eminem (who…
3 September, 2012
2 min

Another bunch of R (and JAGS) scripts

Probably sooner than I expected, I have managed to also upload the codes for the examples in Chapter 5 of the book, which deals with doing Bayesian health economic…
31 August, 2012
3 min

Serendipity (again)

[this time without John Cusack]. This is really weird! I was taking a little break from work (honestly: I’ve just finished back-to-back meetings with two students and I had…
29 August, 2012
2 min

I hate that guy!

Well, I don’t literally hate that guy; and I haven’t thought about this in a while, so things are probably changed. But a couple of years back, after serious consideration…
28 August, 2012
2 min

‘Seriously George: worse than Clegg?’

Nothing much on the telly tonight, so I’m catching up with the blog… The Guardian has published this update on net approval ratings for some top politicians in the UK. These…
28 August, 2012
2 min

UCL symposium - October 18th

That’s just an advert for the UCL Partner Biostatistics Network Symposium “Contemporary Statistical Methods in Medical Research”. This is the 2nd edition; last year I…
28 August, 2012
2 min

INLA functions

I’ve had this idea for a while, and may be I’m finally coming around to doing it. Recently, I’ve been doing some work using INLA and while I was at it, I have written some…
23 August, 2012
2 min

‘Silvio the NHS and Tasmania: what a combo!’

When he was in power, in addition to a funky mood all over the country, sexy Silvio used to promise Italian voters less taxation across the board. Meno tasse per tutti (“less…
23 August, 2012
4 min

Finding thetas in Europe

I love the name of this conference \(-\) that’s one of the geeky-est things I’ve ever heard! The organisers are social scientists and aim at building a scientific network of…
22 August, 2012
1 min

How do we judge worse than the worst?

The Italian film industry are quite weird. In particular, they are curiously inventive when they translate the original title of foreign movies. Here are some of my…
18 August, 2012
5 min

Sweet 16

The birthday paradox is very funny (well: geek-funny, at least). You may think that it’s pretty unlikely that someone you know shares your birthday. In fact, if you know a…
14 August, 2012
2 min

+18 medals but plus or minus what?

This is my last post on the Olympics: promised! My friend Stefano posted this link to an article in (one of the very few) Italian respectable newspapers (more or less the…
8 August, 2012
3 min

A bunch of R (and JAGS) scripts

I finally (nearly) got around to prepare the R code to replicate the examples in the book. I divided the examples by chapter and then linked to the R scripts and, for those…
6 August, 2012
2 min

Curiosity killed the cat

While I was taking Marta to the station earlier today, I heard on the radio that NASA has successfully sent Curiosity, a mobile laboratory, to Mars. Apparently, this is a…
6 August, 2012
2 min

Who are the best team in the Olympics?

Given that I’m a Leo (since I was born in August) and that 2012 is an Olympic year, I thought that this would be quite nice and appropriate as my next favicon. I wonder if…
3 August, 2012
2 min

Non-counterfactual anyone?

Some (probably poorly organised) thoughts on the JSM. 1) it is really a huge conference: most of the talks are in the Convention Centre, but there are so many sessions that…
31 July, 2012
3 min

You’re one of my kind

As my friend Mark said the other day, the best place to spot Italian tourists in London is just outside Lillywhites in Piccadilly, and you can tell them from the other…
29 July, 2012
2 min

One paninO two paninI

The first part of my trip to San Diego has not been too bad at all and certainly better than I was expecting. The flight to Atlanta has been quite smooth and uneventful. The…
28 July, 2012
2 min

Moaning packing and proof-reading

As usual, I’m putting off packing my bag to the very last minute. But I am going to have to go and do it in about 10 minutes. I know that once I actually leave (tomorrow…
27 July, 2012
2 min

Stay classy unauthorised migrant

I still haven’t decided whether I should shave and keep only my moustache, in preparation for my trip to the city of Ron Burgundy (I probably won’t).
24 July, 2012
3 min

Inspire a generation (to hate the Olympics?)

My friend Zoë posted this picture on Facebook.
17 July, 2012
2 min

The BCEA Supremacy

If you’re reading this, you may think that I’ve not really done anything else than being on the blog today. That is not entirely true and between bouts of blogging I have…
17 July, 2012
2 min

Cool cool maps

The final event in our week as socialites was a visit to a photography exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. There was some interesting stuff as well some that I could not…
15 July, 2012
2 min

Should the NHS fund men pregnancy?

Our week has been particularly active, socially. We’ve been out most nights enjoying the lukewarm, if a bit rainy, British autumn (I mean: summer; or do I?). Yesterday we…
15 July, 2012
2 min

Vorsprung durch technik bias (2)

I believe this requires a little follow up. Somewhere else, Lorenzo pointed out that VW Golf drivers are probably worse than Audi’s.
11 July, 2012
2 min

Vorsprung durch technik bias

Unlike the ground-breaking height experiment, this one is complete speculation (and also: no disrespect to anybody, irrespective of the car you drive).
10 July, 2012
2 min

Cakes tea heights and pick up trucks

Earlier today we went to Petersham Nurseries for a slice of cake and a tea. Lovely, as usual.
7 July, 2012
2 min

Pregnancy rates

Paola posted something about Richie Cotton’s blog in which he discusses mathematical modelling of the monthly pregnancy rates.
4 July, 2012
3 min

(Semi)automatic indexing in LaTeX

Perhaps this may be of some help for LaTeX users. After I finished writing the book (by the way: proofs expected in August), I had to deal with the problem of creating an…
4 July, 2012
4 min

Under the Tuscan sun

I have to admit I’ve never read the book, but I remember watching the ads for what I thought was an awful, full of cheap stereotypes movie when I was in Boston a few year…
4 July, 2012
2 min

Welcome home sir

I have to say that the one thing I really envy to the Americans is the way they are greeted by homeland security when they go through passport control in any US airport. In…
27 June, 2012
2 min

τὰ Ὀλύμπια

Due to my very limited photographic skills (OK, as usual I digress: it’s not so much a problem of limited skills \(-\) well, a bit of that too \(-\) my main problem with…
25 June, 2012
2 min

When the going gets tough…

Getting closer to my personal Euro2012 derby: England v Italy.
22 June, 2012
5 min

Bayesian hierarchical glaucoma

Last year (in fact I did some of this while travelling to go to my friend Lorenzo’s stag do \(-\) he’s the one in white, but with no veil), I worked on a clinical paper…
19 June, 2012
2 min

Biscuit

Vinnie the Panda (kind of a New York style wise guy, who advertise a brand of biscuits talking like my cousin Vinny) says: “These guys know a thing or two about biscuit!”.
18 June, 2012
1 min

Storm after the storm

Veeeery slowly but reasonably surely, I’m working my way up the pile of unfinished things that I have miserably neglected in the last month or so.
15 June, 2012
1 min

The next Harry Potter?

The editor just sent me the cover of the book. I think it looks pretty cool (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?…).
13 June, 2012
1 min

Of grants and grunts

I’m about to finish writing up the proposal of a research grant I’m applying for. It’s about the use of Regression Discontinuity Design to evaluate interventions in primary…
12 June, 2012
2 min

Euro 2012 predictions

In the run up to major football events, the guys at the Norwegian Computing Centre always prepare their predictions for the final results. They use a relatively simple model…
8 June, 2012
3 min

Norway

I vaguely knew about Norway, but having being there for a few days I could actually see and ask a few things about it. It’s amazing and humbling how they managed to make the…
4 June, 2012
1 min

Ready(?) for Trondheim

After the exam madness, I’m about to leave sunny England and off to relatively frosty Trondheim to attend and give a talk at the Second Workshop on Bayesian Inference for…
30 May, 2012
3 min

England is the new Spain

Pizza, gelato and motorbike with no jacket.
24 May, 2012
1 min

Bayes Pharma 2012 (again)

Julien has posted his impressions and comments on the conference on Christian Robert’s blog.
22 May, 2012
1 min

Eurovision again

Looks like I’ve not got many new topics these days, but here’s an update on the Eurovision contest paper.
22 May, 2012
2 min

Marking exam papers

I’m hopelessly in the dark land where you spend the whole of your time marking exam papers. And I burnt my tongue at lunch.
21 May, 2012
1 min

We’re on technorati

In a bold and reckless move to take over the cyberspace, I’ve registered the blog on technorati. This is now the 90502-nd most popular blog in the world \(-\) quite…
19 May, 2012
1 min

HPV paper

Our paper on HPV vaccination has been accepted for publication in Medical Care (I believe it will appear shortly in the electronic version). I think it was a nice piece of…
17 May, 2012
2 min

Eurovision contest

Marta and I have been working for sometimes on a cool (as well as kind of very low impact on the scientific community and on the progress of human understanding of the…
16 May, 2012
2 min

Submitting a package to CRAN

The process is relatively smooth, I think - especially if you start off with a Linux machine. However, when I had to compile the package and documentation for BCEA, I still…
16 May, 2012
1 min

Book submitted

The book has been submitted to the editor. Now I only need to fill the marketing questionnaire - and I have a feeling it’s going to be as (if not even more!) difficult…
14 May, 2012
1 min

Amazing EPL

I have to admit I’ve always had a soft spot for Roberto Mancini, as he was my childhood hero, while he was playing for Sampdoria. So, kind of happy for City (although they’re …
13 May, 2012
1 min

Bayes Pharma 2012

Earlier this week, I went to the third edition of Bayes Pharma, which turned out to be quite an interesting short conference. Most people in the audience probably were from…
13 May, 2012
2 min

BCEA on CRAN!

Finally, I got round to find some time to work out all the problems in compiling the BCEA (Bayesian Cost-Effectiveness Analysis) package.
13 May, 2012
1 min

BCEA is coming!

BCEA is a R package designed to perform standardised health economic evaluations using the output of a suitable Bayesian model.
18 April, 2012
1 min
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