About me

My name is Antoine Soetewey. I am a postdoctoral researcher in statistics at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels and HEC Liège. Before that, I obtained a PhD in statistics at UCLouvain, where my research focused on survival analysis and biostatistical methods applied to cancer patients.

In parallel with my research, I teach statistics and probability at the undergraduate and master’s levels as a visiting lecturer at UCLouvain and UNamur.

See my CV for a more detailed overview of my academic and professional background.

Blog - What?

This blog is, as its name suggests, about statistics and R. More specifically, it aims at helping academics and professionals working with data to grasp important statistical concepts using examples and plain English.

When possible, for all statistical concepts covered in this blog, I try to write an article on how to apply them in R (and share the code). I also occasionally present some work related to data science & data visualization using R, news about my research and, to a smaller extent, my journey in the blogging world.

(For the interested reader, see reviews of the blog—and some thoughts about the future plans. In these reviews, I track its performance in R by analyzing page views, sessions, users and engagement using the {googleAnalyticsR} package.)

Why?

Stats and R was launched in December 2019. Friends, family, colleagues and even some readers often ask why I started this blog.

I really enjoy learning new things. I learn (and I am still learning) a lot by teaching statistics to students from diverse backgrounds.

So far, I believed that I understood a statistical concept as soon as I was able to teach it to my students. If I was not able to explain it in a clear and understandable way, it meant that I needed to study it more thoroughly because I actually did not fully understand it.

Throughout this blog, I actually realized that in order to learn and fully understand something new, one must:

be able to clearly communicate it and teach it in simple terms,
but also be able to write it down in a precise and concise manner

So although this blog was first launched to share statistical concepts I am most familiar with (hoping that it would be useful to some people), I now also use it to learn by writing. I think that this additional way of learning is actually as powerful as teaching because writing allows me to consolidate my understanding.

Also, I launched this blog to make statistics accessible to everyone! Statistics is often seen as a challenging course and many students struggle with this subject. Via this blog, I hope that the most common statistical concepts will become more clear so that both students and scientists dealing with data can use them appropriately.

Last but not least, getting valuable feedback from people all over the world makes the whole journey even more interesting and enriching.

If you are interested in learning more why I launched this blog, see the article about the main benefits of maintaining a technical blog.

Contact

Thanks in advance for reading. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, remarks or inquiries.

You can also reach me out on:

Note that this is a personal site. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer(s).