Nov 15, 2014 — Data Visualization & Databits — I am a big fan of interactive data visualization for data exploration and presenting research findings, and thus I wanted to share a new site Sergiy Nesterko recently launched called Databits. The site features interactive visualizations built using a variety... Read more

Apr 29, 2014 — Theory of Maximum Likelihood Estimation — I’ve finally updated and uploaded a detailed note on maximum likelihood estimation, based in part on material I taught in Gov 2001. It is available in full here. To summarize the note without getting into too much math, let’s first... Read more

Dec 22, 2013 — Network Visualization with D3.js — Here is a visualization I constructed using D3.js based on a visualization for Harvard’s Stat 221 class of a network of individuals for whom HIV status is known (original visualization here). I wanted the visualization to maximally exploit the information... Read more

Sep 25, 2013 — Scraping PDFs and Word Documents with Python — This week I wanted to write a Python script that was able to extract text from both pdf files and Microsoft Word documents (both .doc and .docx formats). This actually proved to be rather difficult, particularly when it came to... Read more