R typos

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Amster14At MCMskv, Alexander Ly (from Amsterdam) pointed out to me some R programming mistakes I made in the introduction to Metropolis-Hastings algorithms I wrote a few months ago for the Wiley on-line encyclopedia! While the outcome (Monte Carlo posterior) of the corrected version is moderately changed this is nonetheless embarrassing! The example (if not the R code) was a mixture of a Poisson and a Geometric distributions borrowed from our testing as mixture paper. Among other things, I used a flat prior on the mixture weights instead of a Beta(1/2,1/2) prior and a simple log-normal random walk on the mean parameter instead of a more elaborate second order expansion discussed in the text. And I also inverted the probabilities of success and failure for the Geometric density. The new version is now available on arXiv, and hopefully soon on the Wiley site, but one (the?) fact worth mentioning here is that the (right) corrections in the R code first led to overflows, because I was using the Beta random walk Be(εp,ε(1-p)) which major drawback I discussed here a few months ago. With the drag that nearly zero or one values of the weight parameter produced infinite values of the density… Adding 1 (or 1/2) to each parameter of the Beta proposal solved the problem. And led to a posterior on the weight still concentrating on the correct corner of the unit interval. In any case, a big thank you to Alexander for testing the R code and spotting out the several mistakes…


Filed under: Books, Kids, R, Statistics, Travel, University life Tagged: Amsterdam, Bayesian Analysis, MCMskv, Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, mixtures, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, R, random walk, testing as mixture estimation

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