A short visit to ISU but and therefore a busy and proftable day! About ten appointments in Snedecor Hall after a nice morning run, a highly attended Zyskind Lecture, and many interesting discussions all over the day: e.g., I had a great time discussing using null recurrent Markov chains ... [Read more...]

Another day full of interesting and challenging—in the sense they generated new questions for me—talks at the SuSTain workshop. After another (dry and fast) run around the Downs; Leo Held started the talks with one of my favourite topics, namely the theory of g-priors in generalized linear models. ... [Read more...]

Another full day spent working with Jean-Michel Marin on the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) and the remaining hierarchical Bayes chapter… I have reread and completed the regression and GLM chapters, sent to very friendly colleagues for a last round of comments. Now, ... [Read more...]

Surrounding the great and exciting gathering of Bayesian statisticians in Kyoto last June, several ISBA sections have appeared in the past weeks, as already mentioned on the ‘Og. Along with Anto Mira and Nicolas Chopin (who did most of the organisational work while I was wandering down under!), we discussed ... [Read more...]

Jean-Michel Marin visited me in Paris last week and, besides taking part in Pierre’s PhD defence, we made enough progress to close two more chapters of the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) This follows the good work session we had in Carnon ... [Read more...]

In which Mo Farah et al show James that he's got a nasty heel-strike [Read more...]

Yet another full day working on Bayesian Core with Jean-Michel in Carnon… This morning, I ran along the canal for about an hour and at last saw some pink flamingos close enough to take pictures (if only to convince my daughter that there were flamingos in the area!). Then I ... [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...]

Although this was only a half-day of talks, the third day of the workshop was equally thought-challenging and diverse.  (I managed to miss the ten first minutes by taking a Line 3 train to 125th street, having overlooked the earlier split from Line 1… Crossing south Harlem on a Sunday morning is ... [Read more...]

After a terrific run this morning to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and then around (the ribs are feeling fine, now!), the Bayes-250 talks were exhilarating and challenging. Jim Smith gave an introduction to the challenges of getting different experts to collaborate on a complex risk assessment, much in ... [Read more...]

Followinga few entries on sports here and there, I was wondering what kind of law follow the running records with respect to the distance. The data are available on Wikipedia, or here for a tidied version. It collects 18 distances, from 100 meters to 100 kilometers. A log-log scale is in order: It ... [Read more...]

[Warning: this post about a race I ran yesterday is unlikely to be of interest for most readers!] Following my (un)reasonable time last year, I registered again for the annual “Cross de Bercy”  run by the Sport Club of the Finance Ministry (with whom/which CREST is affiliated). This ... [Read more...]

The most visited post ever on the ‘Og was In{s}a(ne), my report on Radford Neal’s experiments with speeding up R by using different brackets (the second most populat was Ross Ihaka’s comments, “simply start over and build something better”). I just spotted two new entries ... [Read more...]

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...]

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