Applied Australian Change-Point Analysis: Before the Shark Gets Jumped?

Ok I saw the (in)famous Season 5 Episode 3 “Jump the Shark” episode of Happy Days (when Fonzie water skiis over a shark pool) when I was 18 back in 1977, and hated it.

Definitely Uncool.
But one Saturday morning a month or two ago I saw it again and loved it. It’s wild! It’s glorious!

The term has come to mean the point at which a TV series goes down hill, when the wolf becomes a dog, to riff on a previous post.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/03/entertainment/la-et-jump-the-shark-20100903

Anyhow, Australia’s Professor Kerrie Mengersen and Dr Hassen Assareh have developed a snazzy new Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedure for working out the change-point in a process, specifically the point where a key change happened to a hospital patient’s condition for example. Helping to identify the ‘why’, as well as the ‘when’.

https://www.additiveanalytics.com/blog/researchers-develop-new-statistical-technique-better-understand-clinical-outcomes/

It’s a great idea and yet another instance of how Statistics can help save the world, again!

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Author: Dr Dean McKenzie

I hold a BA(Honours) in Psychology from Deakin University, and much more recently, a PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology (Classification & Regression Trees) from Monash University (2009) I have many years experience applying classical (e.g. ANOVA), contemporary (e.g. quantile regression) and data mining (e.g. trees, bagging, boosting, random forests) to psychological, medical and health data using Stata, IBM SPSS, Salford CART and open source Weka, as well as in statistical consulting, and advising people of many different levels of stats experience