Sign in

Matthijs Hollanders

@matthollanders.bsky.social
507 followers 271 following 245 posts

Quantitative ecology, statistics, wildlife, field herping. Post-doctoral Research Fellow @ U of Canberra Consultant @ Quantecol, quantecol.com.au Wildlife tour guide @ Australian Wildlife Encounters, www.australianwildlifeencounters.com

PostsRepliesMedia
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The answer is the reverend!
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Same
001
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
These images are antisemitic.
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Thats cool
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The most elegant way to fatshame
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Do you know if it’s bad for the longevity when this happens? My fans are constantly going when running MCMC on my M5 Pro MBP.
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I don’t know enough about frequentist stats to understand.
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Thats fucking awesome
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Also the prior basically vanishing with lots of observations unless it’s very narrow (you already made up your mind).
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Bayes is a fresh of breath air. Infinitely more intuitive and scalable. Write the Stan program and see how well the optimiser recovers your hierarchical effects. 😁
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I was talking about most principled, not the simplest!
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
are you sure brms doesn’t do fixed effects without a shared scale by default, and random effects without sum to zero?
120
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
It’s not much of a hassle, and it seems reasonable that if you include a categorical predictor, that the effects share a common scale.
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
You identify the intercept. The interpretation is now the mean across your levels.
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
In Stan or pymc, create a sum to zero vector and give it a normal prior.
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I remember a tweet from @rmcelreath.bsky.social saying he sometimes modeled categorical effects as hierarchical (I assume drawn from a normal with shared scale). I reckon modeling them this way, with a sum-to-zero constraint to retain a nice intercept, *has* to be the most principled strategy.
130
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Wow really?
001
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
With your carbon footprint?
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Great time to be looking for some tiger snakes.
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Data stickers that are science enthusiasts
000
Reposted by Matthijs Hollanders
Jarno Vanhatalo @jarnovanhatalo.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
During the many long term ecological change projects in @rececochange.bsky.social, we have concretely learned how important long term data are. Here some thoughts on the topic 👇 Long-Term Community Data Reveal Ecological and Evolutionary Phenomena - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
annualreviews.org
Long-Term Community Data Reveal Ecological and Evolutionary Phenomena
Resolving the ecological and evolutionary processes affecting biodiversity requires long-term community data. By separating short-term variability from directional change and by revealing lags spannin...
0116
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
How about those of us that feel ethically conflicted using these carbon fiends
031
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
You don’t think Obama tortured?
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
What if he commits suicide?
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This implies it can be learned.
140
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
The strongest evidence that I’ve seen for that we live in a simulation is the apparent number of people that know how to use regex.
150
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
You know how to use regex??
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Stan in the hands of stats GOATs but still inclusive 👏🏼
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Following.
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Wow what are the chances I also saw a full moonrise last night
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Epic few days finding wildlife in the Top End.
020
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Just watched your talk, it was great. The recovery of the population mean, is there a parallel with kriging/making predictions for unobserved locations with a GP?
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
It would be the one place where the imposter syndrome isn’t imagined.
011
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
One day I’ll be at StanCon. Not presenting that’s for sure though.
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
When did you abandon Stan?
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Yesterday was today yesterday
020
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Can you hold them accountable
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Not to be that guy but did you organise an inspection prior to purchase?
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I mostly use it for math/stats concepts. I’ll look for ones that do that!
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Do you have tips? It's overwhelming for a noob. I've got a Pro chip with 64 gb ram; using qwen3.6-35b-a3b now. What do you mean with hooking up infra to API?
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Set it up yesterday, seems to work well! thanks
100
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
That looks good. But you could easily do this with your other approach too right? Just set alpha[j] = tau[j], or as i do, alpha[1] = gamma, alpha[2:J] = mu * tau[1:(J-1)], where tau is scaled to ahve geometric mean 1, mu is estimated, and gamma is estimated as well as an initial pop. correction.
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I do it here too, estimating either the Dirichlet concentration (1/alpha) or logistic-normal scale. Seems to work well. mhollanders.github.io/occARU/artic...
mhollanders.github.io
The occARU model
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
alpha=1 also gets quite informative with large number of surveys.
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Have you tried estimating alpha? The sparsity of the entry simplex is identified.
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
i forgot about this
000
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Cheers
010
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
See these are exactly the things a layperson like me doesn’t know.
110
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Sure does thanks.
011
Matthijs Hollanders @matthollanders.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Congrats!
010