A statistician plays darts

A Statistician Plays Darts

Darts is enjoyed both as a pub game and as a professional competitive activity. Yet most players aim for the highest scoring region of the board, regardless of their skill level. By modeling a dart throw as a 2-dimensional Gaussian random variable, we show that this is not always the optimal strategy. We develop a method, using the EM algorithm, for a player to obtain a personalized heatmap, wh...

Towards a Neural Statistician

An efficient learner is one who reuses what they already know to tackle a new problem. For a machine learner, this means understanding the similarities amongst datasets. In order to do this, one must take seriously the idea of working with datasets, rather than datapoints, as the key objects to model. Towards this goal, we demonstrate an extension of a variational autoencoder that can learn a m...

Confessions of a Pragmatic Statistician

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Darts and hoopla board design

The Empoisoned Darts of Venus

OIn 1775 Joseph Priestley issued the first volumes of his Experiments & Observations on different kinds of Air [1], the fruit of work which had been occupying him for the previous four or five years [2], In the appendix to volume II of Priestley's work appeared a letter dated 3rd October 1775 in which the writer asserts that there is "no room to doubt of the great advantages the medical world m...