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I’m excited to announce that r-package-dev, a skill for developing statistical and numerical R packages with a multi-agent workflow, is now available on my GitHub! The idea is that the input to the skill is a reasonably well-defined issue for an R package, and the output is a pull request (PR) solving the issue. This…

The R package {cssr} is back in active development. The previous update was in January 2025 to version 0.1.8, and there hadn’t been significant changes since 2023. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve put it through a round of robustness fixes, much-expanded documentation, and a top-to-bottom review of the code against the paper. No…

Version 1.10.0 of {fetwfe} is now available on CRAN. Since the previous CRAN version, 1.5.0, I’ve added a handful of new features, a correction to the standard errors that’s worth knowing about if you upgrade, and a lot of internal cleanup. This post covers the updates. (If you’re new to the package, {fetwfe} implements fused…

Yesterday I presented at the American Statistical Association Marketing Seminar Series. I spoke about the television advertising industry’s (e.g. Nielsen, VideoAmp, iSpot) move towards measure advertisements’ effectiveness based on outcomes (conversions) instead of reach and frequency, and the methodological and data challenges this shift presents. I shared my experience both in the industry and as…

When posting images online, adding alt text, or alternative text, helps people who rely on it because for whatever reason they can’t view images. For example, it’s helpful for blind and visually impaired people who rely on screen readers. It also shows up in place of any images that fail to load for whatever reason.…

On Monday I was lucky to give a presentation on “Predicting Rare Events by Shrinking Towards Proportional Odds” at the 90/30 Club. I’m grateful to the current organizers Ryo Sakai, Logan Graves, and Max Phelps for having me, as well as the founder of the group, Lydia Nottingham. I figured this is as good of…

Version 1.5.0 of {fetwfe} just hit CRAN. This is the first time I’ve posted about the package since the 0.4.4 blog announcement back in February, although I quietly shipped 1.0.0 to CRAN in May (and many incremental versions on GitHub as well). There have been lots of changes since 0.4.4, and I’ll outline them in…

The most common application for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is answering questions from a large source, like a codebase, a book, or documentation. I made a Colab notebook that demonstrates both a basic RAG workflow and a different use case: customer service. Customer service teams often receive repetitive questions that require near-identical answers. The classic way…

When treatment assignment is randomized, one model that people often use for estimating treatment effects is (sometimes called the ANCOVA II model), where is the binary treatment indicator (1 if unit is treated, 0 if not), is a vector of covariates for unit , and is the sample mean of the covariates. Theorem 7.2 of…

On Tuesday, I gave a talk (jointly with Katy Mitchell) titled “Innovations in Cross-Screen Incremental Outcome Measurement” at the Advertising Research Foundation‘s 2025 AUDIENCExSCIENCE Conference. The main topic was the methodology I’ve been developing at VideoAmp for measuring incremental conversions for a particular digital platform. This methodology uses observational causal inference techniques to estimate incremental…