Jeremy Foote

Jeremy Foote

Computational social scientist studying cooperation and collaboration in online communities; faculty at Purdue University.

Negative binomial regression standard errors in knitr

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Now if that blog post title doesn’t get your blood moving, I don’t know what will.

I just spent far too long finding a dependency bug that I thought I’d document.

I used the glm.nb function from the MASS library (in R) to build a negative binomial model of contributions to wikis. I saved the model to an .Rdata file, which I then imported into my Rtex knitr document. When I built the document, the table of the regression results showed the correct coefficients, but the standard errors and z-scores were different from what R was reporting.

I finally figured out that I had to import the MASS library in my knitr document. Apparently, it is used for calculating the standard errors, even after the model is fit.

You May Also Enjoy

I get to be a professor!

3 minute read

Published:

Eight years ago, I left my job as a product manager and decided that I wanted to go back to school. During the next six months, I taught myself some basic Python and learned as much as a I could about Master’s degree programs studying “the Internet”. I was fortunate enough to learn about and be accepted into the Media, Technology, and Society program at Purdue, where I took my first courses in Communication (while simultaneously teaching my first courses in Communication!). I had an incredible advisor in Seungyoon Lee, and wonderful mentors like Sorin Matei, Lorraine Kisselburgh, and Torsten Reimer.

Superlinear stress

3 minute read

Published:

My wife and I recently had our fourth(!) child. He is really wonderful and having an infant in the house has been magical and fantastic.