Following a question on X Validated, I became aware of the following descriptions of the pros and cons of Bayesian analysis, as perceived by whoever (Tim Arnold?) wrote SAS/STAT(R) 9.2 User’s Guide, Second Edition. I replied more specifically on the point It [Bayesian inference] provides inferences that are ...

Following my earlier post on Kinderman’s and Monahan’s (1977) ratio-of-uniform method, I must confess I remain quite puzzled by the approach. Or rather by its consequences. When looking at the set A of (u,v)’s in R⁺×X such that 0≤u²≤ƒ(v/u), as discussed in the previous ...

As discussed in the previous entry, there are two interpretations to this question from The Riddler: “…how long is the longest path a knight can travel on a standard 8-by-8 board without letting the path intersect itself?” as to what constitutes a path. As a (terrible) chess player, I would ...

One approach to random number generation that had always intrigued me is Kinderman and Monahan’s (1977) ratio-of-uniform method. The method is based on the result that the uniform distribution on the set A of (u,v)’s in R⁺xX such that 0≤u²≤ƒ(v/u) induces the distribution with density ...

David Rossell and Francisco Rubio (both from Warwick) arXived a month ago a paper on non-normal variable selection. They use two-piece error models that preserve manageable inference and allow for simple computational algorithms, but also characterise the behaviour of the resulting variable selection process under model misspecification. Interestingly, they show ...

The Riddler of this week had a riddle that is a variation of the knight tour problem, namely “…how long is the longest path a knight can travel on a standard 8-by-8 chessboard without letting the path intersect itself?” the riddle being then one of a self-avoiding random walk [kind]… ...

Following my earlier post on Delyon and Portier’s proposal to replacing the true importance distribution ƒ with a leave-one-out (!) kernel estimate in the importance sampling estimator, I ran a simple one-dimensional experiment to compare the performances of the traditional method with this alternative. The true distribution is a N(0,½) with ...

A straightforward but probabilistic riddle this week in the Riddler, which is to find the expected order of integer i when the sequence {1,2,…,n} is partitioned at random into two sets, A and B, each of which is then sorted before both sets are merged. For instance, if {1,2,3,4} is divided ...

An interesting question about stratified sampling came up on X validated last week, namely how to optimise a Monte Carlo estimate based on two subsequent simulations, one, X, from a marginal and one or several Y from the corresponding conditional given X, when the costs of producing those two simulations ...

The next AISTATS conference is taking place in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, on April 20-22. (The website keeps the same address one conference after another, which means all my links to the AISTATS 2016 conference in Cadiz are no longer valid. And that the above sunset from Florida is named… cadiz.jpg!) ...

[A review of Bayesian Essentials that appeared in Technometrics two weeks ago, with the first author being rechristened Jean-Michael!] “Overall this book is a very helpful and useful introduction to Bayesian methods of data analysis. I found the use of R, the code in the book, and the companion R ...

As I was previously unaware of this book coming up, my surprise and excitement were both extreme when I received it from CRC Press a few weeks ago! John Chambers, one of the fathers of S, precursor of R, had just published a book about extending R. It covers some ...

Following my post of yesterday about the missing condition in Lynch’s R code, Gérard Letac sent me a paper he recently wrote with Luc Devroye on correlation matrices and copulas. Paper written for the memorial volume in honour of Marc Yor. It considers the neat problem of the ...

A s I figured out while working with astronomer colleagues last week, a strange if understandable difficulty proceeds from the simplest and most studied statistical model, namely the Normal model x~N(θ,1) Indeed, if one reparametrises this model as x~N(υ⁻¹,1) with υ__0, a single observation x brings very little information ...

Quite a coincidence! I just came across another bug in Lynch’s (2007) book, Introduction to Applied Bayesian Statistics and Estimation for Social Scientists. Already discussed here and on X validated. While working with one participant to the post-ISBA softshop, we were looking for efficient approaches to simulating correlation matrices and ...