Is there a seasonal component to the COVID-19 mortality rate? A thread with some figures with Maria Chikina on what seems to be a question of underestimated importance. 🧵 1/8 Slightly longer version here: math.cmu.edu/~wes/aus.html

syracuse.com/coronavirus/20… I do wonder on what time scale (if any) we will consider making some of these rules through a democratic process.

Alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG) is a chemical used by the cell to make amino acids, energy & reverse the "DNA methylation" clock. Feeding 18-month old female mice AKG reduced hair greying, frailty & extended median lifespan 10-16% 💪 Worked less well on boys 😒 tinyurl.com/y6qpyrtu

Happy to announce our recent paper with Maria Chikina, Jonathan Mattingly, and Alan Frieze on new Markov chain significance tests in the context of redistricting problems. It includes examples from the 2019 Common Cause v. Lewis case in North Carolina. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

At a time when many comments from just a few months ago have aged badly this timeless quote from Bertrand Russell is both inspirational and comforting. Stick to the facts, respect those that disagree and you are sure to have few regrets.

This thread on a recent paper from Emily Oster and others is making the rounds. It is an extremely critical thread employing strong language, questioning the basic judgement and statistical understanding of the authors. A quick, polite thread with some comments on this.1/12

When considering doing a correlation analysis, a useful thought experiment is to imagine the conclusion for every possible outcome (+, -, NS). This avoids the trap of only accepting the results that reinforce one’s prior and discarding others with some post-hoc explanation.

New preprint with Maria Chikina: "The paradoxical nature of easily improvable evidence" When trying to reason about available evidence which is filtered through the lens of publication bias, what you *don't* see can be as informative as what you do see. 1/2 arxiv.org/abs/2205.14016

Our new paper with Nathan Clark nclark.bsky.social and Amanda Kowalczyk looking at mammalian sparse hair phenotype is now online. elifesciences.org/articles/76911

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: How (Some) Mammals Lost Their Body Hair new release on lab publication from Amanda Kowalczyk and Maria Chikina healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/… via University of Utah Health

We just posted a new preprint on benchmarking deconvolution methods. With an appropriately realistic simulation we get highly counter-intuitive results. The problem is far from being completely solved! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

If you need to deconvolve bulk RNAseq data and like BayesPrism (tinyurl.com/bdzddefv) consider InstaPrism (tinyurl.com/2p8s7rcj). Same results but much faster.

In our new paper embopress.org/doi/full/10.15… we show that unlike gene expression methylation changes persist for months after infection and could be used to predict infection timing. Great effort by Wayne Mao.

Hopefully this in depth evaluation will pave the way for more accurate personalized gene expression models. We will surely need more data and likely different models and training paradigms.

Can someone explain Fig 2 of nature.com/articles/s4157…. Why do some nascent RNA techniques give signal past the transcription end site and others don't.

A 🧵 on some of my intuitions/priors about the genetics of complex and molecular traits in humans (i.e. what I think of as typical), largely motivated by GWAS/QTL studies over the past decade [citing papers with nice figures where possible]

Our work benchmarking proportion estimation methods (genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…) finds BayesPrism (nature.com/articles/s4301…) among the top performers. We introduce a fast re-implementation InstaPrism: same accuracy, orders of magnitude faster! academic.oup.com/bioinformatics…