Simulation

recents advances in Monte Carlo Methods

February 8, 2012 | xi'an

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...]

semi-automatic ABC

December 17, 2011 | xi'an

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...]

Andrew gone NUTS!

November 23, 2011 | xi'an

Matthew Hoffman and Andrew Gelman have posted a paper on arXiv entitled “The No-U-Turn Sampler: Adaptively Setting Path Lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo” and developing an improvement on the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm called NUTS (!). Here is the abstract: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) ... [Read more...]

understanding computational Bayesian statistics

October 9, 2011 | xi'an

I have just finished reading this book by Bill Bolstad (University of Waikato, New Zealand) which a previous ‘Og post pointed out when it appeared, shortly after our Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R. My family commented that the cover was nicer than those of my own books, which is ... [Read more...]

workshop in Columbia [day 3]

September 26, 2011 | xi'an

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...]

Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo

September 21, 2011 | xi'an

At JSM, John Kimmel gave me a copy of the Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo, as I had not (yet?!) received it. This handbook is edited by Steve Brooks, Andrew Gelman, Galin Jones, and Xiao-Li Meng, all first-class jedis of the MCMC galaxy. I had not had a chance ... [Read more...]

Numerical analysis for statisticians

August 25, 2011 | xi'an

“In the end, it really is just a matter of choosing the relevant parts of mathematics and ignoring the rest. Of course, the hard part is deciding what is irrelevant.” Somehow, I had missed the first edition of this book and thus I started reading it this afternoon with a ... [Read more...]

The foundations of Statistics [reply]

July 18, 2011 | xi'an

Shravan Vasishth has written a response to my review both published on the Statistics Forum. His response is quite straightforward and honest. In particular, he acknowledges not being a statistician and that he “should spend more time studying statistics”. I also understand the authors’ frustration at trying “to recruit several ... [Read more...]

The foundations of Statistics: a simulation-based approach

July 11, 2011 | xi'an

“We have seen that a perfect correlation is perfectly linear, so an imperfect correlation will be `imperfectly linear’.” page 128 This book has been written by two linguists, Shravan Vasishth and Michael Broe, in order to teach statistics “in  areas that are traditionally not mathematically demanding” at a deeper level than ... [Read more...]

Hammersley and Handscomb 1964 on line

May 26, 2011 | xi'an

Through the webpage of the Advanced Monte Carlo Methods I & II, given a few years ago by Michael Mascagni at ETH Zürich, I found a link to the scanned version of the 1964 book Monte Carlo Methods by Hammersley and Handscomb. This is a short book, with less than 150 pages, ... [Read more...]

No simulation is complete without a gif

March 24, 2011 | Adam.Hyland

I promise this is my last post on the now week and a half old π pay! Building on the last post, I figured I could show how convergence actually works in the estimation algorithm. If you’ll recall, we plotted … Continue reading → [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...]

Copula Functions, R, and the Financial Crisis

March 10, 2011 | Matt Bogard

From: In defense of the Gaussian copula, The Economist"The Gaussian copula provided a convenient way to describe a relationship that held under particular conditions. But it was fed data that reflected a period when housing prices were not correlated to the extent that they turned out to be when ...
[Read more...]

Adap’skiii [day 2]

January 5, 2011 | xi'an

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 ...
[Read more...]

History makes Stat. Science!

December 31, 2010 | xi'an

While the above heading sounds like a title in reverse, its words are in the “correct” order in that our paper with George Casella, A Short History of Markov Chain Monte Carlo, has been accepted for publication by Statistical Science. This publication may sound weird when considering that the paper ... [Read more...]

More typos in Chapter 5

December 29, 2010 | xi'an

Following Ashley’s latest comments on Chapter 5 of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R, I realised Example 5.5 was totally off-the-mark! Not only the representation of the likelihood should have used prod instead of mean, not only the constant should call the val argument of integrate, not only integrate  uses lower ...
[Read more...]
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