Over a welcomed curry yesterday night in Edinburgh I read this 2008 paper by Koopman, Shephard and Creal, testing the assumptions behind importance sampling, which purpose is to check on-line for (in)finite variance in an importance sampler, based on the empirical distribution of the importance weights. To this goal, the ... [Read more...]

Last semester (Fall 2014), I organized and taught an interdisciplinary, collaborative class titled Probability for Scientists. Getting 4 separate teachers on the same page was a challenge, but as scientists we're used to communicating over email, and ... [Read more...]

Today, Jean-Michel Loubes from Toulouse gave a seminar in Dauphine on the estimation of deformations using Wassertsein distances. This is functional data analysis, where samples from random transforms of the original density are observed towards estimating the baseline (or true) measure As a neophyte, I found the problem of interest ... [Read more...]

Just received this announcement of the UCLID 2014 conference in Lancaster, July 1-2 2014: Understanding Complex and Large Industrial Data 2014, or UCLID, is a workshop which aims to provide an opportunity for academic researchers and industrial practitioners to work together and share ideas on the fast developing field of ‘big data’ analysis. ... [Read more...]

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Here is a question from my friend Shravan Vasishth about the consequences of using a stopping rule: Psycholinguists and psychologists often adopt the following type of data-gathering procedure: The experimenter gathers n data points, then checks for significance (p [Read more...]

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Great news! The RSS is setting a data analysis challenge this year, sponsored by the Young Statisticians Section and Research Section of the Royal Statistical Society: Details are available on the wordpress website of the Challenge. Registration is open and the Challenge goes live on Tuesday 6 May 2014 for an exciting 6 ... [Read more...]

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Here are the slides of the tutorial on ABC methods I gave yesterday at both AISTAST 2014 and MLSS. (I actually gave a tutorial at another MLSS a few years ago, on the pretty island of Berder in Brittany, next to Vannes.) They are definitely similar to previous talks and tutorials ... [Read more...]

As the Le Monde mathematical puzzle of this week was a geometric one (the quadrangle ABCD is divided into two parts with the same area, &tc…) , with no clear R resolution, I chose to bypass it. In this April 3 issue, several items of interest: first, a report by Etienne Ghys ... [Read more...]

Our newly created Chaire “Economie et gestion des nouvelles données” in Paris-Dauphine, ENS Ulm, École Polytechnique and ENSAE is recruiting a data scientist starting as early as May 1, the call remaining open till the position is filled. The location is in one of the above labs in Paris, the ... [Read more...]

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Simulating a bivariate normal under the constraint (or conditional to the fact) that x²-y²=1 (a non-linear zero measure curve in the 2-dimensional Euclidean space) is not that easy: if running a random walk along that curve (by running a random walk on y and deducing x as x²=y²+1 ... [Read more...]

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With Matt Moores and Kerrie Mengersen, from QUT, we wrote this short paper just in time for the MCMSki IV Special Issue of Statistics & Computing. And arXived it, as well. The global idea is to cut down on the cost of running an ABC experiment by removing the simulation of ... [Read more...]

As my student Kévin Guimard had not mailed me his own Poisson slice sampler of a Poisson distribution, I could not tell why the code was not working! My earlier post prompted him to do so and a somewhat optimised version is given below: As you can easily check ... [Read more...]