Marc Dotson
@marcdotson.com
210 followers 420 following 60 posts
Causal Inference | Bayesian Statistics | Machine Learning // Husband, father, Latter-day Saint, assistant professor of data analytics, nerd. Blog: occasionaldivergences.com | GitHub: github.com/marcdotson
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Marc Dotson
juliasilge.com
It was such a pleasure to speak today at #PositConf2025 about how BADLY 😱 it went when I tried to learn Python ~10 years ago, and how tooling in the ecosystem has changed (gotten better!) in the intervening decade.

You can check out my slides at:
juliasilge.github.io/get-unstuck-...
How I got unstuck with Python
juliasilge.github.io
marcdotson.com
It’s been a lot of fun working on this project and connecting marketing methodology with my political science roots.
andrew.heiss.phd
Newly published at NVSQ with @sch-ir.bsky.social and @marcdotson.com! A neat conjoint experiment (analyzed w/fancy multinomial Bayesian models) measuring the effect of anti-NGO crackdown on donor behavior!

Prepreint+code: www.andrewheiss.com/research/art...
Official version: doi.org/10.1177/0899...
Navigating Hostility: The Effect of Nonprofit Transparency and Accountability on Donor Preferences in the Face of Shrinking Civic Space

Donors unhappy
when states restrict NGOs—
’cept when transparent.

Suparna Chaudhry, Marc Dotson, and Andrew Heiss, “Navigating Hostility: The Effect of Nonprofit Transparency and Accountability on Donor Preferences in the Face of Shrinking Civic Space,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (2025), doi: 10.1177/08997640251348654 Navigating Hostility: The Effect of Nonprofit Transparency and Accountability on Donor Preferences in the Face of Shrinking Civic Space

Suparna Chaudhry, Marc Dotson, and Andrew Heiss

Abstract
Governments across the world have increasingly used laws to restrict the work of nonprofits, which has led to a reduction in public or official foreign aid directed towards these groups. Many international nonprofits, in response, have turned to individual donors to offset the loss of traditional funding. What are individual donors’ preferences regarding donating to legally besieged nonprofits abroad? We conducted a conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of likely donors in the US and found that learning about host government criticism and legal restrictions on nonprofits decreases individuals’ preferences to donate to them. However, organizational features such as financial transparency and accountability can protect against this dampening effect. Our results have important implications both for understanding private international philanthropy and how nonprofits can better frame their fundraising appeals at a time when they are facing restrictive civic spaces and hostile governments abroad.

Estimated marginal means and average marginal component effects for conjoint experiment results
Estimated marginal means and average marginal component effects for the interaction between transparency and crackdown
marcdotson.com
There are a lot of introductions to Python, but this one is mine. It includes a walkthrough of using uv for environment management, Polars for data wrangling, seaborn.objects for visualization, and scikit-learn for modeling. #rstats #python #pydata
An introduction to Python for R users – Occasional Divergences
This introduction to Python assumes you know R, which is used as an analogy to explain Python for data analysis.
occasionaldivergences.com
Reposted by Marc Dotson
andrew.heiss.phd
Headed back home after a whirlwind visit! Logan is a gorgeous city and USU is doing really neat work with teaching data analytics
The Hunstman School of Business at Utah State University Old Main at Utah State University The Logan LDS Temple Big bowl of Aggie ice cream in a waffle cone bowl
marcdotson.com
PyData Northern Utah is partnering with HackUSU for a special in-person meetup: An introduction to Python dashboards using polars, seaborn.objects, and Quarto: www.meetup.com/pydata-north...
marcdotson.com
For our first PyData Northern Utah meetup of 2025, we are continuing to look at a data wrangling tools with @healthandstats.bsky.social as guide. For anyone in and around Cache Valley, join our Northern Utah chapter at www.meetup.com/pydata-north...
marcdotson.com
Python ignorance validated. I didn't realize there was a kernel selection option inside the Jupyter notebook. Thanks for the assist, @juliasilge.com.
Reposted by Marc Dotson
eleafeit.bsky.social
Lots of folks are discovering the relevance of decision theory to the practical problem of analyzing an A/B. A quick🧵
Reposted by Marc Dotson
andrew.heiss.phd
Woohoo, our paper is live!

This haiku summarizes it best:

Raw model results?
Stop! Hard to understand! Use
{marginaleffects}
vincentab.bsky.social
Our JSS article is out!

And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned.

www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...
marcdotson.com
#morepiesthanpeople
Reposted by Marc Dotson
posit.co
Posit @posit.co · Oct 31
No trick, all treats - posit::conf(2024) talks are now on YouTube! 🍬

Over a thousand people gathered in Seattle and online to dive into all things open-source data science. With 100+ talks, there's a lot to explore!

Check out the playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

#RStats #Python
posit conf 2024 talk recordings and workshop materials
Reposted by Marc Dotson
andrew.heiss.phd
This administrative attack on the nonprofit sector fits with a pattern of authoritarian restrictions on civil society that's been going on for the past decade+ @suparnac.bsky.social and I (and others) have done a bunch of research on this from an intl/comparative perspective #nonprofitsky #polisky 🧵
Reposted by Marc Dotson
Reposted by Marc Dotson
juliasilge.com
My first screencast in quite a while! Take a first look at how to use #Positron, the new data science IDE I have been working on, for data analysis with #rstats, using this week's #TidyTuesday dataset on orca encounters 🐳
youtu.be/5BojM5EciPs
First look at Positron, exploring orca encounters
YouTube video by Julia Silge
youtu.be
Reposted by Marc Dotson
juliasilge.com
We've got a brand new, baby website for Positron! Take a look if you are interested in getting started, and please let us know how it goes:
positron.posit.co
Positron
A next-generation data science IDE
positron.posit.co
Reposted by Marc Dotson
andrew.heiss.phd
Just discovered the Causal Quartet by @lucystats.bsky.social, @travisgerke.bsky.social, and @malcolmbarrett.malco.io: four datasets that have the same unadjusted casaul relationship between treatment/outcome but different true effects. This is great for teaching DAG-based causal inference! #rstats
Four scatterplots showing the same relationship four four datasets, all showing a slope of 1, but in reality they all have different true slopes that can only be uncovered through proper statistical adjustment Four common DAGs: a collider, a confounder, a mediator, and M-bias
marcdotson.com
Okay, I’ll bite: How do you read so much?!
marcdotson.com
You're on fire.🤞
Reposted by Marc Dotson
Reposted by Marc Dotson
rmcelreath.bsky.social
The International Society for Bayesian Analysis tells me Statistical Rethinking has won the 2024 DeGroot Prize for its contributions to "statistical inference, decision theory and statistical applications". This is huge honor especially given the previous winners who have influenced me so much.
Cover of Statistical Rethinking Winners of the DeGroot Prize

2021
Nicolas Chopin and Omiros Papaspiliopoulos (2020). An Introduction to Sequential Monte Carlo. Springer.

2019
Subhashis Ghosal and Aad van der Vaart. Fundamentals of Nonparametric Bayesian Inference. Cambridge University Press.

2017
David Banks, Jesus Rios, and David Rios Insua.  Adversarial Risk Analysis.  CRC Press.

2015
Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern, David B. Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Donald B. Rubin.  Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition.  CRC Press.

2013
Noel Cressie and Christopher Wikle (2011).  Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data.  John Wiley and Sons.

Kevin P. Murphy (2012). Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective. MIT Press.

2011
Jay Kadane (2011).  Principles of Uncertainty.  CRC Press.

2009
Giovanni Parmigiani and Lurdes Inoue (2009). Decision Theory: Principles and Approaches. John Wiley and Sons.

Carl Edward Rasmussen and Christopher K. I. Williams (2006). Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning (freely availa
Reposted by Marc Dotson
andrew.heiss.phd
New blog post! Read about Posit's new Positron editor, see some of the neat new features it has, and check out the settings and extensions I use. It includes a bonus workaround for connecting to a remote server with SSH! #rstats
Fun with Positron | Andrew Heiss
Combine the best of RStudio and Visual Studio Code in Posit’s new Positron IDE
www.andrewheiss.com