On Friday, I received a nice but embarrassing email from Xavier Didelot. He indeed reminded me that I attended the talk he gave at the model choice workshop in Warwick last May, as, unfortunately but rather unsurprisingly giving my short span memory!, I had forgotten about it! Looking at the ...

As we were completing our arXiv summary about ABC model choice, we were helpfully pointed to a recent CRiSM tech. report by X. Didelot, R. Everitt, A. Johansen and D. Lawson on  Likelihood-free estimation of model evidence. This paper is quite related to our study of the performances of the ...

This may sound like a paradoxical title given my recent production in this area of ABC approximations, especially after the disputes with Alan Templeton, but I have come to the conclusion that ABC approximations to the Bayes factor are not to be trusted. When working one afternoon in Park City ...

This was my first trip to Lyon in about… 35 years, I think, but I did not have much time to tour the city! My original plan was to go climbing with Ivan near La Meije right after the talk, but our respective knees were hurting for the past week at ...

Next week, I am going to Lyon to give a seminar in Université Lyon I. I will talk about the recent Rao-Blackwellisation papers we wrote, hopefully managing to make sense with both statisticians and probabilists, unlike in recent talks of mine in probability seminars… The slides are close to those ...

Doug Rivers, professor of Political Sciences in Stanford, kindly sent me this email yesterday night: The 2nd displayed equation in section 2.1.2 on p. 44 is garbled (it might be interpreted as saying that U and X have the same distribution). I think you intended: And indeed we should have stated the ...

The translation of the book Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R is now published and out! I have received five copies in the mail yesterday, although it was not produced in time for my R class students to get it before the exam today. The book is still indicated on ...

A few days ago, Peng Yu sent me this email Dear Prof. Robert, The citation Edwards and Sokal (1988) appears on page 326 of your book MCSM2. However, I don’t find in in the Reference section (it would have appear on page 601 if it is in the reference section). I don’...

Martin Kilbinger, an astronomer (cosmologist) with whom we had worked on population Monte Carlo for cosmological inference [during the ANR-05-BLAN-0283- 04 ANR ECOSSTAT grant], has made the PMC C codes available on the CosmoPMC webpage. He has also written a CosmoPMC manual that is now available from arXiv. And ...

With Jean-Michel Marin, Pierre Pudlo and Robin Ryder, we just completed a survey on the ABC methodology. It is now both arXived and submitted to Statistics and Computing. Rather interestingly, our first draft was written in Jean-Michel’s office in Montpelier by collating the ‘Og posts surveying new ABC papers! (...

David Scott wrote a review of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R in the International Statistical Review that is rather negative, since the main bulk reads as follows: I found some aspects of the book very disappointing. The first chapter (“Basic R Programming”) has some unfortunate mistakes and some statements, ...

Another exciting day at Adap’skiii!!! Yves Atchadé presented a very recent work on the fundamental issue of estimating the asymptotic variance estimation for adaptive MCMC algorithms, with an intriguing experimental observation that a non-converging bandwidth with rate 1/n was providing better coverage than the converging rate. (I always found ...