Sign in

Aidan Bindoff

@aidanbindoff.bsky.social
97 followers 115 following 61 posts

Biostatistician: dementia, aging, and neuroscience. Slowly being gentrified by the Derwent Valley. Constant state of renovation. On Linawina country. @AidanB@fosstodon.org

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Aidan Bindoff
Australian Museum Eureka Prizes @eurekaprizes.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
TAS Test @aidanbindoff.bsky.social from @utas.edu.au is a finalist in the Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research. Learn more: youtu.be/lcHGJQmcDjM #EurekaPrizes
Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research finalist team, TAS Test.
031
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
1/7 Preprint's live: "Partial pooling predicts cross-validation reliability: a closed-form triage and Rao–Blackwellised cure for hierarchical LOO" arxiv.org/abs/2607.18836 PSIS-LOO fails predictably on hierarchical models. Here's the pattern, and the fix. 🧵
arxiv.org
Partial pooling predicts cross-validation reliability: a closed-form triage and Rao-Blackwellised cure for hierarchical LOO
For hierarchical models, Pareto-smoothed importance-sampling leave-one-out cross-validation (PSIS-LOO) fails on the folds where a random-effect coordinate is data-driven and its group is small. We sho...
120
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
If you've ever found yourself questioning the conclusions drawn from PSIS-LOO on a hierarchical model, or facing a multi-day exact LOO-CV, I think you'll appreciate my latest contribution to the #bayesian ecosystem - Rao-Blackwellised LOO with the rbloo package. www.github.com/ABindoff/rbloo
github.com
GitHub - ABindoff/rbloo: Rao-Blackwellized leave-one-out cross-validation
Rao-Blackwellized leave-one-out cross-validation. Contribute to ABindoff/rbloo development by creating an account on GitHub.
300
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Rao-Blackwellizing all the things #bayesian
000
Reposted by Aidan Bindoff
Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 19/06/2026
Very interesting talk by @mendelrandom.bsky.social on the apparent effect of shingles vaccines on dementia. Clear discontinuity from shingles vaccines on shingles, but not on dementia, in this much larger follow up in England, using similar analytic choices as the Wales study that showed a benefit.
RDD of cumulative risk of shingles over time, with a sudden drop when shingles vaccines are introduced.RDD of cumulative risk of dementia over time, with no clear discontinuity when shingles vaccines are introduced.
511136
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Building the smoothbp R package, I had an intuition about what causes funnel pathology in hierarchical models. I was wrong. But chasing that intuition led somewhere more fundamental to the centring vs non-centring decision than I had hoped. New paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.19655
arxiv.org
A Flat Connection: The Pooling Factor and the Geometry of Centring in Hierarchical MCMC
Standard MCMC diagnostics ($\hat{R}$, effective sample size, divergence counts) detect whether a chain has mixed, but not why it has not. We ask whether the centring/non-centring obstruction in hierar...
161
Reposted by Aidan Bindoff
ArXiv Paperboy (Stat.ME+Econ.EM) @paperposterbot.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
arXiv📈🤖 smoothbp: Fast Bayesian Hierarchical Piecewise Regression with Smoothed Transitions and Spike-and-Slab Model Selection By Bindoff
Piecewise regression models are essential for identifying structural changes in longitudinal or spatial data across diverse scientific domains. While standard approaches often assume sharp, instantaneous transitions and single, non-hierarchical breakpoints, many real-world phenomena exhibit gradual, smoothed transitions that vary systematically across groups. We introduce smoothbp, an R package for fast, Bayesian hierarchical piecewise regression featuring logistic-smoothed transitions. By implementing a bespoke Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampler in Rust, smoothbp combines exact conjugate updates for linear terms with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) transitions for non-linear location and sharpness parameters. smoothbp natively supports multiple change-points, random intercepts, random change-point timing, and structural covariates on all segment parameters. It also incorporates Kuo and Mallick (1998) spike-and-slab priors for automatic inference on the number of active breakpoints via the smoothbp_ss function. We document the sampler, validate parameter recovery and calibration through simulation-based calibration and interval-coverage studies, and contrast smoothbp against the existing software landscape across R, Python, Julia, and MATLAB, demonstrating its competitive efficiency against general-purpose probabilistic programming languages like brms and specialized packages like mcp.
021
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
🎉 excited to share: the preprint for smoothbp is now live on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2606.19044 and v0.1.7 is on its way to CRAN. The package implements smoothed hierarchical breakpoint with spike'n'slab detection for longitudinal Bayesian models. Feedback welcomed. #rstats #bayesian #statistics
arxiv.org
smoothbp: Fast Bayesian Hierarchical Piecewise Regression with Smoothed Transitions and Spike-and-Slab Model Selection
Piecewise regression models are essential for identifying structural changes in longitudinal or spatial data across diverse scientific domains. While standard approaches often assume sharp, instantane...
010
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Fantastic short article on how to understand uncertainty, apparent contradiction, and consensus in science
000
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
There's a classic story of Hilbert attending one of Von Neumann's lectures on Hilbert spaces, and Hilbert raising his hand at the end to ask "what is a Hilbert space?" - very relatable as I review my own work on fiber bundle connections in hierarchical models
000
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Is anyone in my network an endorser for STAT.CO on arxiv.org? My co-authors typically submit elsewhere so I'm drawing a blank here #Rstats #Bayesian
010
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
smoothbp is now on CRAN! Fit hierarchical piecewise regression models with smoothed change-points, spike-and-slab regularisation, and a Rust-powered sampler — so it's fast. Great for data with structural breaks you want to localise without hard discontinuities (i.e differentiable) #rstats #CRAN
030
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
smoothbp has been submitted to CRAN! Hierarchical piecewise regression with smoothed change-points in #RStats - multi-breakpoint models, spike-and-slab regularisation for automatic breakpoint selection, and a fast MCMC sampler written in Rust under the hood. #rstats #statistics #bayesian
281
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Is anyone here a member of fosstodon.org and can send me an invite link? I miss the old twitter back when my feed was all statistics and science
fosstodon.org
Fosstodon
Fosstodon is an invite only Mastodon instance that is open to those who are interested in technology; particularly free & open source software. If you wish to join, contact us for an invite.
010
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
If you're using agentic workflows (e.g. Claude) and value reproducibility and transparency, check out github.com/ABindoff/rep... - an MCP server that brings reproducibility logging to AI-assisted scientific computing
github.com
GitHub - ABindoff/repro-mcp
Contribute to ABindoff/repro-mcp development by creating an account on GitHub.
100
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Ladies Cottage, Willow Court, Brigita Ozolins exhibition
010
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Imagine mistakenly drinking cyanide laced Flavor-Aid, thinking it was cyanide laced Kool-Aid? They must have felt so silly when they realized they had been tricked into drinking Flavor-Aid!
000
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Another day, another study using Shapiro-Wilk to assess "normality of data", and not reporting those results (which was fine, because the outcome was dichotomized anyway, because of course it was...)
000
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
We're all well aware that "correlation does not imply causation" but few heed this warning when it comes to ratios; indeed you can find them uncritically thrown about almost everywhere
000
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
The vibe coding apps are marketing to me so hard rn. The thing is, I have to methodically specify what I need whether I write the functions or AI does it and happily I do that best by ...writing code.
020
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
I appreciate that it's staggeringly brazen, but do we think Bondi erred when she claimed to have the Epstein list then later denied it exists? I think this administration is very comfortable with protecting power structures (beyond govt) that they are a part of, and want you to know you don't matter
000
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
If you have zero education, this will sound like good advice
150
Reposted by Aidan Bindoff
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 03/02/2025
So it turns out that compared to centralized distribution of digital information on the web, printed material in libraries provided a kind of distributed defense against the casual whims of an authoritarian government aiming to rewrite history.
291283295
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
AI is an arms race for the world superpowers, and it's certainly not a competition to see who can come up with the best chatbot (like some commenters seem to think)
020
Reposted by Aidan Bindoff
The Viking (Gunnar Blohm) @gunnarblohm.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Dendrites endow artificial neural networks with accurate, robust and parameter-efficient learning - Nature Communications
Artificial neural networks, central to deep learning, are powerful but energy-consuming and prone to overfitting. The authors propose a network design inspired by biological dendrites, which offe...
16214
Aidan Bindoff @aidanbindoff.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Spent a big chunk of the holidays on farm projects including restoring the old hut that stands sentinel at the front of my property
3100