Articles by xi'an

Statistical analyses using R

April 22, 2011 | xi'an

Another book I received from the Short Book Reviews section of the International Statistical Review is Everitt’s and Hothorn’s Handbook of statistical analyses using R. Here is a [blog-ified] version of my book review. This book is the second (blue) edition of a successful (violet) handbook that can ... [Read more...]

Lack of confidence [revised]

April 21, 2011 | xi'an

Following the comments on our earlier submission to PNAS, we have written (and re-arXived) a revised version where we try to spell out (better) the distinction between ABC point (and confidence) estimation and ABC model choice, namely that the problem was at another level for Bayesian model choice (using posterior ... [Read more...]

Thomas Bayes, 250 years later

April 21, 2011 | xi'an

A link on R-bloggers signaled a series of blogs and videos by IBM Netezza about Thomas Bayes and the consequences of his theorem. Which made me realise this was indeed the 250th anniversary of his death, and that maybe we (as a collective, incl. ISBA) should have done something on ... [Read more...]

Mixtures in Madrid (3)

April 14, 2011 | xi'an

For my second lecture today, I need to plot a likelihood surface for a basic two-component mixture with only the means unknown: here is the R code to speed up things llsurf=function(trumyn=2.,wayt=.3,var2=1.,ssiz=500){ # draws the log-likelihood surface and a random sample sd2=sqrt(var2) parti=(runif(... [Read more...]

Le Monde puzzle #13

April 13, 2011 | xi'an

This week, Le Monde offers not one but three related puzzles: Is it possible to label the twelve edges of a cube by consecutive numbers such that the sum of the edge numbers at any of the eight nodes is constant? Is it possible to label the eight nodes of ... [Read more...]

Mixtures in Madrid

April 10, 2011 | xi'an

As I already did two years ago, in connection with the double degree between UAM and Dauphine, I will give a short graduate course at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM). It will be part of the regular fourth year statistics course and will focus on mixtures, as given in ... [Read more...]

Buffon versus Bertrand in R

April 7, 2011 | xi'an

Following my earlier post on Buffon’s needle and Bertrand’s paradox, above are four outcomes corresponding to four different generations (among many) of the needle locations. The upper right-hand side makes a difference in the number of hits (out of 1000). The R code corresponding to this generation was made ... [Read more...]

When Buffon meets Bertrand

April 6, 2011 | xi'an

When Peter Diggle gave his “short history” of spatial statistics this morning (I typed this in the taxi from Charles de Gaulle airport, after waiting one hour for my bag!), he started with a nice slide about Buffon’s needle (and Buffon’s portrait), since Julian Besag was often prone ... [Read more...]

Le Monde puzzle [#8]

March 29, 2011 | xi'an

Another mathematical puzzle from Le Monde that relates to a broken calculator (skipping the useless tale): Given a pair of arbitrary positive integers (x,y) a calculator can either substract the same integer [lesser than min(x,y)] from both x and y or multiply either x or y by 2. ... [Read more...]

Time series

March 28, 2011 | xi'an

(This post got published on The Statistics Forum yesterday.) The short book review section of the International Statistical Review sent me Raquel Prado’s and Mike West’s book, Time Series (Modeling, Computation, and Inference) to review. The current post is not about this specific book, but rather on why ... [Read more...]

R [re-]exam

March 27, 2011 | xi'an

In what seems like an endless cuRse, I found this week I had to re-grade a dozen R exams a TA’s did not grade properly! The grades I (X) got are plotted below against those of my TA (Y). There is little connection between both gradings… As if this ... [Read more...]

R-ecap [-16]

March 26, 2011 | xi'an

This morning, I noticed that none of my R related posts had appeared on R-bloggers for the past fortnight… After investigating, this was caused by…cut-and-paste! Indeed, when advertising about the special issue of TOMACS Arnaud Doucet and I edit about Monte Carlo methods in Statistics, I copied the main ... [Read more...]

Le Monde puzzle [#7]

March 26, 2011 | xi'an

The mathematical puzzle from the weekend edition of Le Monde from a few weeks ago was not too hard to solve by induction but my R code failed miserably! The puzzle was as follows: A calculator is broken in such a way that it starts by exhibiting 0, then pressing 4, 6 or 0 ... [Read more...]

MCMC with errors

March 25, 2011 | xi'an

I received this email last week from Ian Langmore, a postdoc in Columbia: I’m looking for literature on a subject and can’t find it:  I have a Metropolis sampler where the acceptance probability is evaluated with some error.  This error is not simply error in evaluation of the ... [Read more...]

Typos sorted, at last!

March 23, 2011 | xi'an

After posting so many entries about typos in my books (making you wonder how there could be any text left!) and postponing their classification for so long, I decided on Saturday afternoon to collect those entries into a comprehensive pdf document that should be more useful for readers. I incidentally ... [Read more...]

One bicycle for two

March 22, 2011 | xi'an

Robin showed me a mathematical puzzle today that reminded me of a story my grand-father used to tell. When he was young, he and his cousin were working in the same place and on Sundays they used to visit my great-grand-mother in another village. However, they only had one bicycle ... [Read more...]

JCGS 20th anniversary

March 22, 2011 | xi'an

For its 20th anniversary, JCGS offers free access to papers, including Andrew’s discussion paper Why tables are really much better than graphs. (Another serious ending for an April fool joke!) Incidentally (or rather coincidentally), I received today the great news that our Using parallel computation to improve Independent Metropolis-Hastings ... [Read more...]

Statistics forum

March 21, 2011 | xi'an

The ASA is launching a new blog called the Statistics Forum, managed by Andrew Gelman and to which I will periodically contribute items that may induce some amount of discussion within the community, like the first entry by Michael Lavine on testing. (Meaning I will double-post on the Og and ...
[Read more...]

Looking at the "Curse of Dimensionality" with R, foreach, and lattice

March 20, 2011 | xi'an

Here are the results of a "Curse of Dimensionality" homework assignment for Terran Lane's Introduction to Machine Learning class. Pretty pictures, interesting results, and a good exercise in explicit parallelism with R. It's neat to see distance scaling linearly with standard deviation, and linearly with the Lth-root for an L-norm ... [Read more...]

Bertand’s paradox [R details]

March 19, 2011 | xi'an

Some may have had reservations about the “randomness” of the straws I plotted to illustrate Bertrand’s paradox. As they were all going North-West/South-East. I had actually made an inversion between cbind and rbind in the R code, which explained for this non-random orientation. Above is the corrected version, ...
[Read more...]
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