Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
@mattansb.msbstats.info
Statistics lecturer | Freelance statistical consultant & research analyst | #rstats dev @easystats.github.io

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(He/Him)
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1k followers! Calls for a re-introduction:

Statistics lecturer, freelance stats consultant, & #rstats dev @easystats.bsky.social 📊

I try to help social scientists make better inferences from their data & communicate their findings 👨‍🏫

Hope to bring the #stats twitter/R community vibes over to bsky!
Build a an example for next week's class of using #shiny in @quarto.org with results from a #brms mixture model.

I think it turned out pretty cool 😎
November 27, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
November 26, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
I will give another talk about mediation analysis and I have finally figured out what I want to say about "design-based" solutions:
- longitudinal data can help rule out certain types of confounding
- if you sequentially intervene on X and M, you need assumptions to piece the estimates together
>
November 26, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
I believe eigen fly. I believe eigen touch the sky.
November 26, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Some thoughts on empirical distributions of z-scores
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/24/s...
Some thoughts on empirical distributions of z-scores | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
November 24, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
If you’re still hunting for color tools, I’m working on a more user-friendly version of meodai.github.io/poline/ keeping you huedrated
November 23, 2025 at 12:42 AM
I wanted to be a clinical psychologist,but when I started my BA I discovered experimental psych.

So then I wanted to be an experimental psychologist,but when I started my MA I discovered statistics.

Then someone on a stats FB group asked if I provide consultation services,& here I am 10 yrs later.
What’s the lore behind choosing your career path ?
November 23, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
An upd report on our workshops for Ukraine series on #RStats, #Python & more. So far, we have raised >113k euro & the workshops have been attended by > 5000 ppl!
👇you can find more info on how you can help & a detailed report.
All info on workshops: bit.ly/3wBeY4S 1/n
November 23, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Getting journal rejections like
November 21, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Find someone that looks at you the way that universities look at AI
November 22, 2025 at 10:10 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
#rstats Please welcome Jarl, a new R linter.

Jarl is a CLI tool with extensions in VS Code, Positron, and Zed. It can check thousands of lines of R code in milliseconds.

Jarl provides several output formats, a Github Actions workflow, and more.

Blog post: www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2025-1...
November 20, 2025 at 4:50 PM
I was talking with a friend who is a data scientist. We discussed the various models he uses, etc. He then told me his boss told him *not* to mention uncertainty in any of his reports ("it looks bad that we're unsure").

So maybe that's the difference between data science and #stats? 🤷‍♂️
November 22, 2025 at 11:40 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Science in 2025
November 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Did you know, that in 'honour' of wakefield, there is an #rstats package named after him that generates fake data?
Makes me proud to be an R user.
November 21, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Belated but hopefully still exciting #rstats news: bridgesampling version 1.2-1 has just arrived on CRAN: cran.r-project.org/package=brid...
We now finally provide cmdstanr support (!) plus Monte Carlo Standard Error (MCSE), both thx to Giorgio Micaletto and @avehtari.bsky.social!
bridgesampling: Bridge Sampling for Marginal Likelihoods and Bayes Factors
Provides functions for estimating marginal likelihoods, Bayes factors, posterior model probabilities, and normalizing constants in general, via different versions of bridge sampling (Meng & Wong, ...
cran.r-project.org
November 19, 2025 at 5:34 PM
What a little gemstone from {tidytext} to order axes *within* facets!

#rstats

juliasilge.github.io/tidytext/ref...
November 19, 2025 at 10:36 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
No! Clearly the world consists of infinitely many small likelihoods and a massive prior simplex over them!
Skub
The Perry Bible Fellowship
share.google
November 19, 2025 at 6:51 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
I had to check what I recommend in my book. And Poison priors (right) are also cursed. I'm working on something new with Gelman and Vehtari, so will make a note to review our examples for some consistency in these contexts.
November 18, 2025 at 3:07 PM
The default prior for the intercept in both {rstanarm} and {brms} are very wide.

Counterintuitively - being on the logit scale, this is actually translates to a **strong** prior that p(y=1) is near 1 or near 0.

Always check your priors!

#rstats
November 18, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Today a student told me they found an "old" article from the 2000s 💀
November 17, 2025 at 10:47 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Doctor says, 'Dont worry, parser design is simple. Great programmer Kate Compton has written the parser you seek’
November 16, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
My #rstats cheat code for today is the binom.confint function in the binom package that will spit out *12* different ways of calculating a CI for a proportion.

Also, this is why you use R for statistics...

(and of course the correct CI method is bayes 😎)
November 16, 2025 at 2:52 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
No. I don't teach at the moment. Search committees are free to slide into my DMs, though
November 8, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
I've done a lot of work in Python this fall, and it hasn't endeared me to the language at all. Why does stuff have to be so complicated when you're doing it in Python?
blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/python-is-...
Python is not a great language for data science. Part 1: The experience
It may be a good language for data science, but it’s not a great one.
blog.genesmindsmachines.com
November 13, 2025 at 4:16 PM
This year I'm teaching an advanced stats course for our psych grad students, and I want to squeeze as much causal stuff as I can - but there's just too much!

ATE, DAGs, confounder selection, table 1 & 2 fallacies, collider bias, ...

What else should I squeeze in there?
November 13, 2025 at 11:30 AM