Another problem generated by X’validated (on which I spent much too much time!): given an unbiased coin that produced M heads in the first M tosses, what is the expected number of additional tosses needed to get N (N__M) consecutive heads? Consider the preliminary question of getting a ... [Read more...]

After many delays and exchanges of emails, our AMIS paper with Jean-Marie Cornuet, Jean-Michel Marin and Antonietta Mira eventually made it into the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics. I am quite glad it is now published as it will publicize the method... [Read more...]

Next Thursday (Jan. 16), at the RSS, there will be a special half-day meeting (afternoon, starting at 13:30) on Recent Advances in Monte Carlo Methods organised by the General Application Section. The speakers are Richard Everitt, University of Oxford, Missing data, and what to do about it Anthony Lee, Warwick University, Auxiliary ... [Read more...]

Over the weekend, I have added a few slides referring to recent papers mentioning the convergence of ABC algorithms, in particular the very relevant paper by Dean et al. I had already discussed in an earlier post. (This is taking a larger chunk of my time than expected! I am ... [Read more...]

My Paris colleague (and fellow-runner) Aurélien Garivier has produced an interesting comparison of 4 (or 6 if you consider scilab and octave as different from matlab) computer languages in terms of speed for producing the MLE in a hidden Markov model, using EM and the Baum-Welch algorithms. His conclusions are that ... [Read more...]

I just received this announcement for the opening of a (tenured/civil servant) position in the national research institute in biostatistics, genetics, and agronomy, INRA: Position opening with profile Approximate inference techniques in complex systems Key activities and required skills: You will develop methodological research in the field of statistical ... [Read more...]

The birthday problem (i.e. looking at the distribution of the birthdates in a group of n persons, assuming [wrongly] a uniform distribution of the calendar dates of those birthdates) is always a source of puzzlement [for me]! For instance, here is a recent post on Cross Validated: I have 360 ... [Read more...]

One of my students wrote the following code for his R exam, trying to do accept-reject simulation (of a Rayleigh distribution) and constant approximation at the same time: which I find remarkable if alas doomed to fail! I wonder if there exists a (real as opposed to fantasy) computer language ... [Read more...]

(This post is the preliminary version of a book review by Alessandra Iacobucci, to appear in CHANCE. Enjoy [both the review and the book]!) As Rob J. Hyndman enthusiastically declares in his blog, “this is a gem of a book”. I would go even further and argue that The Art ... [Read more...]

Le Monde puzzle of last weekend was about sudoku-like matrices. Consider an (n,n) matrix containing the integers from 1 to n². The matrix is “friendly” if the set of the sums of the rows is equal to the set of the sum of the columns. Find examples for n=4,5,6. Why ... [Read more...]

As mentioned in the latest post on ABC, I am giving a short doctoral course on ABC methods and convergence at CREST next week. I have now made a preliminary collection of my slides (plus a few from Jean-Michel Marin’s), available on slideshare (as ABC in Roma, because I ... [Read more...]

In the revision of Bayesian Core on which Jean-Michel Marin and I worked together most of last week, having missed our CIRM break last summer (!), we have now included an illustration of what happens to an AR(p) time series when the customary stationarity+causality condition on the roots of ... [Read more...]

Another arXiv posting I had had no time to comment is Nial Friel’s and Jason Wyse’s “Estimating the model evidence: a review“. This is a review in the spirit of two of our papers, “Importance sampling methods for Bayesian discrimination between embedded models” with Jean-Michel Marin (published in ... [Read more...]

As the ‘Og reached its 1500th post and 3000th comment at exactly the same time, a wee and only mildly interesting Sunday morning foray in what was posted so far and attracted the most attention (using the statistics provided by wordpress). The most visited posts: Title Views Home page 203,727 In{... [Read more...]

I received the following email about Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R a few days ago: Hallo Dr. Robert, I  am studying your fine book for myself. There´s a little problem in examples 7.17 and 8.1: in the R code a function “gu” is used and a reference given to ex. 5.17, ... [Read more...]

Buying the special issue of La Recherche on “La révolution des mathématiques”, I discovered that this is the Alan Turing Year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Turing‘s birth. The math department at the University of Leeds has a webpage on all the events connected with ... [Read more...]

The pre-X’mas puzzle in Le Monde weekend edition is about “magical numbers” having as digits all digits between 0 and n (at least once) and being multiple of all digits between 1 and (n+1). Easy, isn’t it?! I thought so while driving down to the Alps on Saturday and (on ... [Read more...]

The talk of Wednesday afternoon Ordinary Meeting of the Royal Statistical Society went on quite well, I think. I would have expected a few people (in general) and some specific people (in particular) but this being the last week of term the schedule was not the best of times. Paul ... [Read more...]

This paper by Brad Efron came to my knowledge when I was looking for references on Bayesian bootstrap to answer a Cross Validated question. After reading it more thoroughly, “Bayesian inference and the parametric bootstrap” puzzles me, which most certainly means I have missed the main point. Indeed, the paper ... [Read more...]

After a loooong break, here is one Le Monde mathematical puzzle I had time to look at, prior to going to Dauphine for a Saturday morning class (in replacement of my R class this week)! The question is as follows: A set of numbers {1,…,N} is such that multiples of 4 ... [Read more...]