2020 Plans

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I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, but this post is more about those things that I wish to accomplish in this coming year. Someone once told me that you should do a little of whatever you want to do in the coming year on New Year’s day (e.g. if you want to read more, read a bit; if you want to draw, sketch a little something). I would like to blog more, so this should start the year off right.

Blog Posts in the Pipeline

I have a few projects that started in 2019 that I need to complete in 2019. As this blog is dedicated mostly to methods (while this site is dedicated to community based projects), I want to re-start by “Stan a Day” program. Last year I tried to implement some kind of algorithm in Stan, or at least work in Stan directly everyday. I had some success (e.g. here), but I would like to pursue this in 2020.

On this site…

I bought a few books that I would like to implement in Stan with some toy data (e.g. Bayesian Cost-Effectiveness Analysis and The Oxford Handbook of Bayesian Econometrics). If I can at least generate a few implementations of some of the models in these books, I’ll be happy.

Another blog post that has yet to be written is a simulation study on method employed on a paper I read. In this paper they used Lasso regression to select for predictors and then fed them into another model and then repeated this process many times. I have already done some simulation studies on this, but I want to write up the results before I give additional details.

On NC Triad Research

I started a community-focused site in 2019. The idea was to do more community salient analysis on one site, leaving this site as somewhat rambly. I think that community focused research and analysis is incredibly powerful, and it would be fun to look at local news and policy with the most advanced analytical tools. Perhaps the analysis can be presented to city council to make local changes, or in the least serve as a resource for others.

I have a few fun blog posts in mind for the site regardless:

  • An investigation of the money left on the table from not maximizing Medicaid enrollments. This requires a good bit of data scraping, time series analysis with spatial effects. Regardless of one’s opinion of Medicaid1, it is “free” money from the government.

  • A post on differences in assessed taxes across the different wards in Winston-Salem. There might be nothing there, but on the other hand, then could be something.

  • I’ve been gathering data for two years on another topic, so until it’s posted, I’ll keep the last series of blog posts to myself.

Happy 2020 and more to come!

  1. I’m all for it and I wish North Carolina would expand it. ↩


Citation

BibTex citation:

@online{dewitt2020
author = {Michael E. DeWitt},
title = {2020 Plans},
date = 2020-01-01,
url = {https://michaeldewittjr.com/articles/2020-01-01-2020-plans},
langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Michael E. DeWitt. 2020. "2020 Plans." January 1, 2020. https://michaeldewittjr.com/articles/2020-01-01-2020-plans