Eric J Ma's Website

I've recently been considering the problem of when to stop measuring something, especially in the biological sciences. Turns out, John Kruschke has given this a ton of thought, in the psychological sciences.

I listened to a talk, freely... (read more)

I recently followed an interesting Twitter conversation, in which one tweet struck me as surprising:

@jakevdp (read more)

(1316 words, approximately 7 minutes reading time)

Following on the heels of me recently attending Thomas Wiecki's Boston Bayesians talk, I decided to put up a notebook showing a lightweight example of how to do Bayesian modelling with PyMC3. Comments are welcome!

The notebook can be found... (read more)

Graduate school has taught me the importance of being able to learn almost anything, and to learn that thing as quickly as possible. I think that's an important skill to have in life.

(Ironically, it's taken me much of 5 years, now going on... (read more)

I recently have been trying out the Atom text editor for writing. While its load times are slower than Sublime Text, it overall is a solid text editor. Being free doesn't... (read more)

Sparse matrix multiplication shows up in many places, and in Python, it's often handy to use a sparse matrix representation for memory purposes.

One thing nice about the newest version of Python 3 is the @ operator, which takes... (read more)

Jupyter Lab was announced at SciPy 2016! And oh my, this is an exciting development.

It currently is a very alpha-stage project, and so it didn't work on my Mac, but it worked beautifully... (read more)

I have been developing network visualization implementations for Python, mostly because I needed them. I also believe in open source principles, that broadly useful and applicable code should be made freely available with their implementations made... (read more)

I use networks as part of my research, and visualization is a very important part of it. The problem with network visualizations is that most people default to node-link diagrams that end up looking like (read more)

Like PyCon 2016, I ended up doing the Hallway Track at SciPy 2016, which really meant hanging out in the hallway, talking with people, fixing code bugs, and... (read more)