A simple challenge in Le Monde this week: find the group of four primes such that any sum of three terms in the group is prime and the overall sum is minimised. Here is a quick exploration by simulation, using the schoolmath package (with its imperfections): A=primes(start=1,end=53)[... [Read more...]

I would like to thank Tal Galili for establishing and maintaining the blog aggregator at R-bloggers. This site has been added to their directory and new posts which are tagged with R will now appear on their feed. https://www.r-bloggers.com/ In part a, I presented a series of ... [Read more...]

In recent months, there has been a series of high profile incidents in the United States where police officers were killed. While such events are unfortunate, the data suggests that it is extremely rare for an officer to be harmed or killed while on duty. In this post, I examine ... [Read more...]

After the very exciting and I think quite successful ABC in Paris meeting two years ago, Michael Stumpf from Imperial College London suggested a second edition in London along the same lines. Michael kindly associated me with the planning of this meeting. It is (logically) called ABC in London (or ... [Read more...]

This is the 1000th post on the ‘Og! Here are the entries that have had above 1000 views (not viewers) so far: In{s}a(ne)!! 5,353 “simply start over and build something better” 4,345 Julien on R shortcomings 1,966 Sudoku via simulated annealing 1,762 Of black swans and bleak prospects 1,462 Do we need an ... [Read more...]

The Bayesian-Frequentist debate reflects two different attitudes to the process of doing science, both quite legitimate. Bayesian statistics is well-suited to individual researchers, or a research group, trying to use all the information at its disposal to make the quickest possible progress. In pursuing progress, Bayesians tend to be aggressive ... [Read more...]

The paper “Exact sampling for intractable probability distributions via a Bernoulli factory” by James Flegal and Radu Herbei got posted on arXiv without me noticing, presumably because it came out just between Larry Brown’s conference in Philadelphia and my skiing vacations! I became aware of it only yesterday and ... [Read more...]

This is a tutorial on how to try out a new package in R. The summary is: expect errors, search out errors and don’t start with the built in examples or real data. Suppose you want to try out a novel statistical technique? A good fraction of the time ... [Read more...]

We have now received reports back from JCGS for our parallel MCMC paper and they all are very nice and supportive! The reviewers essentially all like the Rao-Blackwellisation concept we developed in the paper and ask for additions towards a more concrete feeling for the practical consequences of the method. ... [Read more...]

Another Sudoku-like puzzle from the weekend edition of Le Monde. The object it starts with is a 9×9 table where each entry is an integer and where neighbours take adjacent values. (Neighbours are defined as north, west, south and east of an entry.) The question is about whether or not it ... [Read more...]

Following my post on citations in academic journals, I wanted to go one step further in the understanding of the dynamic of citations. So here, the dataset looks like that: for each article, we have the name of the journal, the year of publicatio... [Read more...]

An ‘Og reader. Emmanuel Charpentier, sent me the following email about model choice: I read with great interest your critique of Peter Congdon’s 2006 paper (CSDA, 50(2):346-357) proposing a method of estimation of posterior model probabilities based on improper distributions for parameters not present in the model inder examination, as ... [Read more...]

I am in Montpellier today for a general meeting of our EMILE ANR grant bi-yearly meeting, discussing ABC model choice and new applications of simulation methods in population genetics, including an upgrade of DIYABC into the 2.0 version. (The above is a picture comparing “true” Bayes factors with ABC versions, commented ... [Read more...]

We have seen yesterday that finding an optimal strategy to publish is not that simple. And actually, it can be even more difficult in the case the journal rejects the paper (not because it is not correct, but because "it does not fit" with the stan... [Read more...]

I am always surprised to see many people on Twitter tweeting about #opendata, e.g. @data4all, @usdatagov, @datapublicatwit, @ProPublica or @open3 among so many others... Initially, I was also very enthousiastic, but I have to admit that open data a... [Read more...]

The second day at the Latent Gaussian Models workshop in Zürich was equally interesting. Among the morning talks, let me mention Daniel Bové who gave a talk connected with the hyper-g prior paper he wrote with Leo Held (commented in an earlier post) and the duo of Janine Illian ... [Read more...]

Got for 2010 Xmas a very cool book called the "4 Hour Body"(thanks Jose Santos) written by Tim Ferriss who write a previous favorite of mine about productivity, the 4 hour work week. Its an interesting book, because it has a scientific approach, it ... [Read more...]

An interesting first day (for me) at the Latent Gaussian Models workshop in Zürich. The workshop is obviously centred at the INLA approach, with Havard Rue giving a short course on Wednesday then a wide ranging tour of the applications and extensions of INLA this afternoon. Thanks to his ... [Read more...]

A fairly simple puzzle in this weekend Le Monde magazine: given five points on a line such that their pairwise distances are 1,2,4,…,14,18,20, find the respective positions of the five points over the line and deduce the missing distances. Without loss of generality, we can set the first point at 0 and ... [Read more...]

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