Perrakis, Ntzoufras, and Tsionas just arXived a paper on marginal likelihood (evidence) approximation (with the above title). The idea behind the paper is to base importance sampling for the evidence on simulations from the product of the (block) marginal posterior distributions. Those simulations can be directly derived from an MCMC ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Bayesian Essentials with R is now available both as an e-book and as a hardcover book on amazon.com!Filed under: Books, R, Statistics, University life Tagged: Bayesian Core, Bayesian Essentials with R, e-book, Jean-Michel Marin, R, Springer-Verlag [Read more...]

This was one headline in the USA Today I picked from the hotel lobby on my way to Pittsburgh airport and then Toronto this morning. The unusual pattern was about observing four U.S. mass murders happening within four days, “for the first time in at least seven years”. The ... [Read more...]

The chapter (Chap. 3) on Bayesian updating or learning (a most appropriate term) for discrete data is well-done in Machine Learning, a probabilistic perspective if a bit stretched (which is easy with 1000 pages left!). I like the remark (Section 3.5.3) about the log-sum-exp trick. While lengthy, the chapter (Chap. 4) on Gaussian models ... [Read more...]

I have to admit the rather embarrassing fact that Machine Learning, A probabilistic perspective by Kevin P. Murphy is the first machine learning book I really read in detail…! It is a massive book with close to 1,100 pages and I thus hesitated taking it with me around, until I grabbed ... [Read more...]

As a result of a corridor conversation in Warwick, I started looking at distributions on the IR³ simplex, and wanted to plot the density in a nice way. As I could not find a proper package on CRAN, the closer being the BMAmevt (for Bayesian Model Averaging for Multivariate ... [Read more...]

While writing an introductory chapter on Bayesian analysis (in French), I came by the issue of computing an HPD region when the posterior distribution is a Beta B(α,β) distribution… There is no analytic solution and hence I resorted to numerical resolution (provided here for α=117.5, β=115.5): and got the following return: which ... [Read more...]

On the flight back from Warwick, I read a fairly recently arXived paper by Umberto Picchini and Julie Forman entitled “Accelerating inference for diffusions observed with measurement error and large sample sizes using Approximate Bayesian Computation: A case study” that relates to earlier ABC works (and the MATLAB abc-sde package) ... [Read more...]

This a final reminder about the October 15 deadlines for MCMSki IV: First, the early bird rate for the registration ends up on October 15. Second, the young investigator travel support can only be requested up to October 15 as well. (For those waiting for the decision about the support to register, the ... [Read more...]

Filed under: R, Running Tagged: Argentan, background, half-marathon, Normandy, race, road races, running, splits [Read more...]

[Read more...]

This a reminder about the October 15 deadlines for MCMSki IV: First, the early bird rate for the registration ends up on October 15. Second, the young investigator travel support can only be requested up to October 15 as well. Be sure to book your hotel or rental place early too as Chamonix ... [Read more...]

The title of this book Informative Hypotheses somehow put me off from the start: the author, Hebert Hoijtink, seems to distinguish between informative and uninformative (deformative? disinformative?) hypotheses. Namely, something like H0: μ1=μ2=μ3=μ4 is “very informative” and the alternative Ha is completely uninformative, while the “alternative null” H1: μ1 [Read more...]

A reposted item of news about MCMSki IV: as posted by Brad Carlin this afternoon to the Biometrics Section and Bayesian Statistical Science Section of the ASA, The fifth joint international meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis), nicknamed “MCMSki IV”, will ... [Read more...]

More exciting (and important!) news about MCMSki IV: First, some if not all of the 9 invited and the 16 contributed sessions are about now documented by abstracts. The program is completely set! If you plan to present a poster, remember to send me by email (a) surname, name (institution): title as ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

As astute ‘Og’s readers may have gathered (!), I am now in Annecy, Savoie, for the 9th IMACS seminar on Monte Carlo Methods. Where I was kindly invited to give a talk on ABC. IMACS stands for “International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation” and the conference gathers themes ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Diego Salmerón and Juan Antonio Cano from Murcia, Spain (check the movie linked to the above photograph!), kindly included me in their recent integral prior paper, even though I mainly provided (constructive) criticism. The paper has just been arXived. A few years ago (2008 to be precise), we wrote together ... [Read more...]