If you remember the previous post, I had two interpretations about Le Monde mathematical puzzle #639: Find all integers with less than 11 digits that are perfect squares and can be written as a(a+6), a being an integer. and: Find all integers with less than 11 digits that are perfect squares and ...

A Le Monde mathematical puzzle about special integers: Find all integers with less than 11 digits that are perfect squares and can be written as a(a+6), a being an integer. Eleven digits being too much for a brute force exploration of the form `for (t in 1:1e11)`…, some preliminary  analysis ...

One student of mine coded by mistake an independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithm with too small a variance in the proposal when compared with the target variance. Here is the R code of this implementation: It produces outputs of the following shape which is quite amazing because of the small variance. The ...

[Here are some comments sent to me by Aki Vehtari in the sequel of the previous posts.] The following is mostly based on our arXived paper with Andrew Gelman and the references mentioned  there. Koopman, Shephard, and Creal (2009) proposed to make a sample based estimate of the existence of the ...

“In this article it is shown that in a fairly general setting, a sample of size approximately exp(D(μ|ν)) is necessary and sufficient for accurate estimation by importance sampling.” Sourav Chatterjee and Persi Diaconis arXived yesterday an exciting paper where they study the proper sample size in an importance sampling ...

A combinatoric Le Monde mathematical puzzle that resembles many earlier ones: Given a pool of 30 interns allocated to three person night-shifts, is it possible to see 31 consecutive nights such that (a) all the shifts differ and (b) there are no pair of shifts with a single common intern? In fact, ...

By some piece of luck, I came upon the book Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple, written by Allen B. Downey and published by Green Tea Press [which I could relate to No Starch Press, focussing on coffee!, which published Statistics Done Wrong that I reviewed a while ago] which ...

A combinatorics Le Monde mathematical puzzle: In the set {1,…,12}, numbers adjacent to i are called friends of i. How many distinct subsets of size 5 can be chosen under the constraint that each number in the subset has at least a friend with him? In a brute force approach, I tried ...

A combinatorics Le Monde mathematical puzzle: How many distinct integers between 0 and 16 can one pick so that all positive differences are distinct? If k is the number of distinct integers, the number of positive differences is 1+2+…+(k-1) = k(k-1)/2, which cannot exceed 16, meaning k cannot exceed 6. From there, picking 6 integers […]

For quite a while, I entertained the idea that Beta and Dirichlet proposals  were more adequate than (log-)normal random walks proposals for parameters on (0,1) and simplicia (simplices, simplexes), respectively, when running an MCMC. For instance, for p in (0,1) the value of the Markov chain at time t-1, the proposal ...

“…likelihood inference is in a fundamental way more complicated than the classical method of moments.” Carlos Amendola, Mathias Drton, and Bernd Sturmfels arXived a paper this Friday on “maximum likelihood estimates for Gaussian mixtures are transcendental”. By which they mean that trying to solve the five likelihood equations for a ...

“…for a general linear model (GLM), a single linear function is a sufficient statistic for each associated parameter…” The recently arXived paper “Likelihood-free inference in high-dimensional models“, by Kousathanas et al. (July 2015), proposes an ABC resolution of the dimensionality curse [when the dimension of the parameter and of the corresponding ...

In conjunction with our reliable ABC model choice via random forest paper, about to be resubmitted to Bioinformatics, we have contributed an R package called abcrf that produces a most likely model and its posterior probability out of an ABC reference table. In conjunction with the realisation that we could ...