Edits to Poisson example in chapter 1 about probabilistic-programming-and-bayesian-methods-for-hackers HOT 4 OPEN

There's reason to doubt that texting behavior is correctly modeled with Poisson statistics at all [1].

Better examples (off the top of my head):

• Minute-by-minute photon counts for the Chandra high-energy space telescope for a given observation
• Minute-by-minute counts for a number of flies on a cow-pie

Those aren't very sexy though :(

[1] A.-L. Barabási, (2005). "The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics.". Nature 435 (7039): 207–211. arXiv:cond-mat/0505371. Bibcode:2005Natur.435..207B. doi:10.1038/nature03459. PMID 15889093

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I agree with your first statement, and in fact it is a poor model (the data's variance is too high ). Later I will reexamine the problem, show that it is a poor model, and propose a better model (negative-binomial)

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Well, I myself am curious how Barabási's model performs on real world data. He's certainly publicized it enough; There's his Nature paper, and he even wrote a book about it (Bursts [2010]).

AFAIK, nobody has ever carried out an analysis of his model in a Bayesian setting. I might be willing to help check it out for your book if you're down.

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Okay, I will try to implement it. It does look very interesting. Thanks for showing me this.

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