By the end of May, in Toronto, we had that great talk at the SSC by Jeff Rosenthal, on monte carlo techniques, and Jeff mention the name of “the Goldilocks principle” (it was in the contect of MCMC, and I did mention it in my talk in London on MCMC, ... [Read more...]

This winter, in my ACT8595 course, I asked my students (that was some homework) to prove that it was possible to derive the conditional distribution when we have a Student-t random vector (and to get the analytical expression of the later). But before, let us recall a standard result about ... [Read more...]

When discussing transformations in regression models, I usually briefly introduce the Box-Cox transform (see e.g. an old post on that topic) and I also mention local regressions and nonparametric estimators (see e.g. another post). But while I was working on my ACT6420 course (on predictive modeling, which is ... [Read more...]

In a recent issue of Significance, I discovered an interesting – and amuzing – figure, about some box & beard plot, in Dr Fisher’s casebook: Beard the statistician in his den. In French, the box plot (introduced by John Tukey, not George Box, as discussed in a previous post) is popular under ... [Read more...]

This week, I discovered a picture on http://waitbutwhy.com/, which represent a (so-called) typical human life, in weeks, I found that interesting. But the first problem is that I don’t understand the limit, below: 90 years, that’s not the average life length. That’s not what you should ... [Read more...]

In almost three weeks, the (FIFA) World Cup will start, in Brazil. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of soccer, so I will not talk to much about it. Actually, I wanted to talk about colors, and variations on some colors. For instance, there are ... [Read more...]

After some delay, the book Computational Actuarial Science with R is now annonced for July 2014. I don’t know if we will be able to get copies for the R in Insurance conference, in London, but I guess everyone is working on it. And kindly, CRC sent me the following ... [Read more...]

A few years ago, a former classmate came back to me with a simple problem. He was working for some insurance company (and still is, don’t worry, chatting with me is not yet a reason for dismissal), and his problem was that their dataset was too large to run (... [Read more...]

Ethan Siegel wrote a post entitled The Math of the Fastest Human Alive five years ago, using regressions. An alternative is too use extreme value models (I wrote a post a long time ago on the maximum length of a tennis match using extreme value theory a few years ago). ... [Read more...]

In the context of AR(1) processes, we spent some time to explain what happens when  is close to 1. if  the process is stationary, if  the process is a random walk if  the process will explode Again, random walks are extremely interesting processes, with puzzling properties. For instance, as , and the ... [Read more...]

Consider some ARCH() process, say ARCH(), where with a Gaussian (strong) white noise . __ n=500 __ a1=0.8 __ a2=0.0 __ w= 0.2 __ set.seed(1) __ eta=rnorm(n) __ epsilon=rnorm(n) __ sigma2=rep(w,n) __ for(t in 3:n){ + sigma2[t]=w+a1*epsilon[t-1]^2+a2*epsilon[t-2]^2 + epsilon[t]=eta[t]*sqrt(sigma2[t]) + } __ par(... [Read more...]

When introducing copulas, it is commonly admitted that copulas are interesting because they allow to model the marginals and the dependence structure separately. The motivation is probably Sklar’s theorem, which says that given some marginal cumulative distribution functions (say  and , in dimension 2), and a copula (denoted ), then we can ... [Read more...]

An interesting question was posted on http://math.stackexchange.com/726205/…: if one knows the covariances  and , is it possible to infer ? I asked myself a question close to this one a few weeks ago (that I might also relate to a question I asked a long time ago, about possible ... [Read more...]

As discussed in the MAT8181 course, there are – at least – two kinds of non-stationary time series: those with a trend, and those with a unit-root (they will be called integrated). Unit root tests cannot be used to assess whether a time series is stationary, or not. They can only detect ... [Read more...]

Monday, in our MAT8181 class, we’ve discussed seasonal unit roots from a practical perspective (the theory will be briefly mentioned in a few weeks, once we’ve seen multivariate models). Consider some time series , for instance traffic on French roads, __ autoroute=read.table( + "http://freakonometrics.blog.free.fr/public/... [Read more...]

I am still working with @3wen on visualizations of the North Pole. So far, it was not that difficult to generate maps, but we started to have problems with the ice region in the Arctic. More precisely, it was complicated to compute the area of this region (even if we ... [Read more...]

Last week (in the MAT8181 course) in order to identify the orders of an ARMA process, we’ve seen the eacf method, and I mentioned the scan method, introduced in Tsay and Tiao (1985). The code below – to produce the output of the scan procedure – has been adapted from an old ... [Read more...]

On the Monkey Cage blog, Baptiste Coulmont (a.k.a. @coulmont) recently uploaded a post entitled “You can vote twice ! The many political appeals of proxy votes in France“, coauthored with Joël Gombin (a.k.a. @joelgombin), and myself. The study was initially written in French as mentioned in ... [Read more...]

This Monday, in the ACT8595 course, we came back on elliptical distributions and conditional independence (here is an old post on de Finetti’s theorem, and the extension to Hewitt-Savage’s). I have shown simulations, to illustrate those two concepts of dependent variables, but I wanted to spend some time ... [Read more...]

Last year, I did mention in a post that unit-root tests are dangerous, because they might lead us to strange models. For instance, in a post, I did obtain that the temperature observed in January 2013, in Montréal, might be considered as a random walk process (or at leat an ... [Read more...]