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...]

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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...]

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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...]

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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...]

I just updated my short review on Bayesian computational tools I first wrote in April for the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Applications. The coverage is quite restricted, as I took advantage of two phantom papers I had started a while ago, one with Jean-Michel Marin, on hierarchical Bayes ... [Read more...]

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My .Rprofile contains a collection of convenience functions and function abbreviations. These are either functions I use dozens of times a day and prefer not to type in full:## my abbreviation of head() h Or problems that I'd rather figure out once, and only once: ## example: ## between( 1:10, 5.5, 6.5 ) between = low & x ... [Read more...]

In a paper arXived on Friday, Roberto Fontana relates the generation of Sudoku grids to the one of Latin squares (which is unsurprising) and to maximum cliques of a graph (more surprising). The generation of a random Latin square proceeds in three steps: generate a random Latin square L with ... [Read more...]

Here are comments by Olli following my post: I think we found a general means to obtain accurate ABC in the sense of matching the posterior mean or MAP exactly, and then minimising the KL distance between the true posterior and its ABC approximation subject to this condition. The construction ... [Read more...]

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Here is the cover of the Japanese translation of our Introducing Monte Carlo methods with R book.  A few year after the French translation. It actually appeared last year in August but I was not informed of this till a few weeks ago. The publisher is Maruzen, with an associated ... [Read more...]