Chris Paciorek is an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics, as well as the Statistical Computing Consultant in the Department's Statistical Computing Facility (SCF) and in the Econometrics Laboratory (EML) of the Economics Department. He is also a user support consultant for Berkeley Research Computing. He teaches and presents workshops on statistical computing topics, with a focus on R.
For many data science problems, there is a need to estimate unknown information from a sequence of observed events. You may want to know, for instance, whether a person is angry or happy, given a sequence of brain scans taken while playing a video game. Or you may be digitizing an ancient text, but, due to water damage, can’t tell what one word in the sequence says. Or in my case (I’m a wildlife biologist), you may want to infer whether an animal is sleeping or eating at any given moment using a sequence of animal GPS locations.
While not as well-known as the bell-shaped Normal (Gaussian) distribution, the Pareto distribution is a powerful tool for modeling a variety of real-life phenomena. It is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), who developed the distribution in the 1890s as a way to describe the allocation of wealth in society. He famously observed that 80% of society’s wealth was controlled by 20% of its population, a concept now known as the “Pareto Principle” or the “80-20 Rule”.
Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library
Michael has worked at the UC Berkeley Library since 2001, and is currently the Public Health Librarian and Liaison to the School of Optometry at the Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library. Michael coordinates public health instruction at the library, and is responsible for the public health collection. Michael has a MLIS from San Jose State University, an MS in Geography from Oregon State University, and a BA in Geography from UC Berkeley. When not at work he lives out his fantasy of being a rock and roll drummer.
Microbiomes are all the rage today and this trendiness is clear with the Human Microbiome Market predicted to be valued at more than 1 billion dollars by the year 2027 (up from 376 million in 2019).
With studies showing that our microbial community is associated with health outcomes, from regulating our brain chemistry and behaviors...
