Over the weekend, I have added a few slides referring to recent papers mentioning the convergence of ABC algorithms, in particular the very relevant paper by Dean et al. I had already discussed in an earlier post. (This is taking a larger chunk of my time than expected! I am ... [Read more...]

The Super Bowl tells us so. The Super Bowl Indicator The championship of American football decides the direction of the US stock market for  the year.  If a “National” team wins, the market goes up; if an “American” team wins, the market goes down. Yesterday the Giants, a National team, ... [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...]

I just received this announcement for the opening of a (tenured/civil servant) position in the national research institute in biostatistics, genetics, and agronomy, INRA: Position opening with profile Approximate inference techniques in complex systems Key activities and required skills: You will develop methodological research in the field of statistical ... [Read more...]

The birthday problem (i.e. looking at the distribution of the birthdates in a group of n persons, assuming [wrongly] a uniform distribution of the calendar dates of those birthdates) is always a source of puzzlement [for me]! For instance, here is a recent post on Cross Validated: I have 360 ... [Read more...]

One of my students wrote the following code for his R exam, trying to do accept-reject simulation (of a Rayleigh distribution) and constant approximation at the same time: which I find remarkable if alas doomed to fail! I wonder if there exists a (real as opposed to fantasy) computer language ... [Read more...]

(This post is the preliminary version of a book review by Alessandra Iacobucci, to appear in CHANCE. Enjoy [both the review and the book]!) As Rob J. Hyndman enthusiastically declares in his blog, “this is a gem of a book”. I would go even further and argue that The Art ... [Read more...]

As mentioned in the latest post on ABC, I am giving a short doctoral course on ABC methods and convergence at CREST next week. I have now made a preliminary collection of my slides (plus a few from Jean-Michel Marin’s), available on slideshare (as ABC in Roma, because I ... [Read more...]

Scientific American has a short article on trends in undergraduate degrees over the past 20 years, illustrated with a great infographic by Nathan Yau. As a big fan of STEM (science, tech, engineering and math) education, I was pleased to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I received the following email today: I am preparing a thesis … I need to conduct the widest possible poll, and it occurred to me that perhaps you could guide me toward an internet-based way in which this can be done easily. I have a ten-question questionnaire prepared, that I wish ... [Read more...]

In the revision of Bayesian Core on which Jean-Michel Marin and I worked together most of last week, having missed our CIRM break last summer (!), we have now included an illustration of what happens to an AR(p) time series when the customary stationarity+causality condition on the roots of ... [Read more...]

On http://www.bakadesuyo.com, there was recently an interesting discussion about infidelity, the key question being "at what ages are men and women most likely to have affairs?" The discussion is based on some graphs, e.g. The source is a paper b... [Read more...]

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Another arXiv posting I had had no time to comment is Nial Friel’s and Jason Wyse’s “Estimating the model evidence: a review“. This is a review in the spirit of two of our papers, “Importance sampling methods for Bayesian discrimination between embedded models” with Jean-Michel Marin (published in ... [Read more...]

As the ‘Og reached its 1500th post and 3000th comment at exactly the same time, a wee and only mildly interesting Sunday morning foray in what was posted so far and attracted the most attention (using the statistics provided by wordpress). The most visited posts: Title Views Home page 203,727 In{... [Read more...]

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I received the following email about Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R a few days ago: Hallo Dr. Robert, I  am studying your fine book for myself. There´s a little problem in examples 7.17 and 8.1: in the R code a function “gu” is used and a reference given to ex. 5.17, ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Even to the practiced eye, looking at coefficients in R model summaries can be tedious. And, capturing information about the significance of coefficients from scores or maybe even hundreds of models in a way that makes writing the final report a bit easier is a time consuming ... [Read more...]

Buying the special issue of La Recherche on “La révolution des mathématiques”, I discovered that this is the Alan Turing Year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Turing‘s birth. The math department at the University of Leeds has a webpage on all the events connected with ... [Read more...]

Here is an interview with Kai Chew, Founder of Cloudstat. CloudStat is developing a cloud-based statistical platform to help researchers who want to make sense of data to do statistical analysis collaboratively with its high performance computing infra... [Read more...]