This week, at the Rmetrics conference, there has been an interesting discussion about heuristic optimization. The starting point was simple: in complex optimization problems (here we mean with a lot of local maxima, for instance), we do not ne... [Read more...]

The European Court of Justice has published its decision in SAS v WPL; the title of the press release says it all “The functionality of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright”. To summarise the background, World Programming Ltd developed a system that was capable ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, we have discussed briefly sums and maximas of i.i.d. random variables using the concept of subexponential distributions. Today, we will introduce the concept of regular variation: a positive function is said to be regularly varying (at i... [Read more...]

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