Luke Bornn, Neil Shephard, and Reza Solgi (all from Harvard) have arXived a pretty interesting paper on simulating targets on a zero measure set. Although it is not initially presented this way, but rather in non-parametric terms as moment conditions where θ is the parameter of the sampling distribution, constrained by ...

For its summer edition, Le Monde mathematical puzzle switched to a lighter version with immediate solution. This #922 considers Egyptian fractions which only have distinct denominators (meaning the numerator is always 1) and can be summed. This means 3/4 is represented as ½+¼. Each denominator only appears once. As I discovered when looking on ...

A puzzling Le Monde mathematical puzzle (or blame the heat wave): A pocket calculator with ten keys (0,1,…,9) starts with a random digit n between 0 and 9. A number on the screen can then be modified into another number by two rules: 1. pressing k changes the k-th digit v whenever it exists ...

“…our findings shall lead to us be critical of certain current practices. Specifically, most papers seem content with comparing some new algorithm with Gibbs sampling, on a few small datasets, such as the well-known Pima Indians diabetes dataset (8 covariates). But we shall see that, for such datasets, approaches that are ...

Here are the  download figures for my e-book with George as sent to me last week by my publisher Springer-Verlag.  With an interesting surge in the past year. Maybe simply due to new selling strategies of the published rather to a wider interest in the book. (My royalties have certainly ...

A funny coincidence: as I was sitting next to Arnoldo Frigessi at the NBBC15 conference, I came upon a new question on Cross Validated about a dynamic mixture model he had developed in 2002 with Olga Haug and Håvård Rue [whom I also saw last week in Valencià]. The ...

Another trip in the métro today (to work with Pierre Jacob and Lawrence Murray in a Paris Anticafé!, as the University was closed) led me to infer—warning!, this is not the exact distribution!—the distribution of x, namely since a path x of length l(x) will corresponds ...

After the Singapore Maths Olympiad birthday problem that went viral, here is a Vietnamese primary school puzzle that made the frontline in The Guardian. The question is: Fill the empty slots with all integers from 1 to 9 for the equality to hold. In other words, find a,b,c,d,e,...

A question recently posted on X Validated by Antoni Parrelada: given two arbitrary cdfs F and G, how can we simulate a pair (X,Y) with marginals  F and G, and with set correlation ρ? The answer posted by Antoni Parrelada was to reproduce the Gaussian copula solution: produce (X’,Y’) ...

“Moreover, IvD point out an error in Nobile’s derivation which can alter its stationary distribution. Ironically, as we shall see, the algorithms of IvD also contain an error.”  Xiyun Jiao and David A. van Dyk arXived a paper correcting an MCMC sampler and R package MNP for the multivariate ...

This is presumably obvious to most if not all R programmers, but I became aware today of a hugely (?) delaying tactic in my R codes. I was working with Jean-Michel and Natesh [who are visiting at the moment] and when coding an MCMC run I was telling them that I ...

Another of those “drop-a-digit” Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Find all integers n with 3 or 4 digits an single interior zero digit, such that removing that zero digit produces a divider of x. As in puzzle #904, I made use of the digin R function: and simply checked all integers up to 10⁶: which ...

Kate Lee pointed me to a rather surprising inefficiency in matlab, exploited in Sylvia Früwirth-Schnatter’s bayesf package: running a gamma simulation by rgamma(n,a,b) takes longer and sometimes much longer than rgamma(n,a,1)/b, the latter taking advantage of the scale nature of b. I ...

This early morning, just before going out for my daily run around The Parc, I checked X validated for new questions and came upon that one. Namely, how to simulate X a Bin(8,2/3) variate and Y a Bin(18,2/3) such that corr(X,Y)=0.5. (No reason or motivation provided for this ...