So for a few months I’ve been quietly rebranding, and it’s time to go a little more public with RJS Data Science. Though I’ve helped out people here and there, it’s time to go more public with my efforts in a more focused way.

A couple of things. My blog over at Realizations in Biostatistics, “abandoned” for sometime now, is officially retired. The main reason for this is (has been) that Blogger simply hasn’t kept up with the times. It’s pretty hard to do a statistical analysis and publish it on Blogger (or Wordpress) – or at least I found a better solution and stopped waiting for them to catch up. Yihui Xie’s excellent blogdown package, along with the underlying technologies, makes publishing statistical blogposts a breeze once you get it set up. (For more on my blogging setup, see the Netlify section of the Blogdown book and related references.) I was a little sad to let Realizations go, because it was a great expressive outlet for a while, and apparently helped quite a few people with O’Brien-Fleming clinical trial designs.

I also briefly had a blog Upstate Data Science that could be considered a first incarnation of this blog, where I was looking for a solution to integrate prose, code, and output. I started that when I was looking at how my local community might benefit from technical help from the community. I’m leaving that up, but won’t create any new content for that either.

And that’s just the blogging.

Over the last few years, I’ve developed an interest in other forms of data than healthcare data - including and especially those involving public data sources. (The series I’m doing with Stan is based on data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics.) These public data sources enrich private data or can simply be used to provide insights about the community around you. Direct merge, hierarchical modeling, or Bayesian analysis methods can be used to combine insights from different data sources.

While I’m not leaving my career in drug development, I am opening myself up to new consulting opportunities. So if you have any statistics, data science, or visualization needs, please contact me using one of the methods below under “Follow Me”!

(Photo credit: Photo by Alvaro Serrano on Unsplash)