david chen

is a pain... NHANES is probably the most useful data for model building. The completeness of data is pretty astounding.  The issue is when to use linear regression or non-linear regression and how to come up with a general purpose model without having to look at each age/gender subgroup (as if they were even defined!). Still working on it...

So I decided to try this blog thing, especially because Weebly made it so darned easy. Not to mention that I'm also procrastinating on writing a paper...mainly because I haven't decided on which journal to submit to yet. It's pretty difficult to balance the time I want to spend making the work better so as to have a higher chance of getting accepted by a higher impact journal with the lack of desire to keep working on it to improve my RMSE by 0.1.

As this site is in general dedicated towards my more professional activities I think I will focus more on my research. For more of a light-hearted David find me on Facebook.

I'll probably fill this up with my trials and tribulations of thesis development. For example, just today I had an amazing conversation with someone I hope to be on my thesis committee about the novelty and methodological contributions of my proposed thesis topic. He not only gave me great insight, but also directed me to new areas that I need to learn: multivariate analysis and structural equation modeling. More will come soon as my research progresses!

David