“We don’t need likelihood functions; we just need to know how to simulate from [them] (…) We don’t need models with sufficient statistics; we just need summary statistics (…) We don’t need to be Bayesian; we just need to be approximately so. We don’t need theory to tell ... [Read more...]

The 24 questions asked by John Halton in the conclusion of his 1970 survey are Can we obtain a theory of convergence for random variables taking values in Fréchet spaces? Can the study of Monte Carlo estimates in separable Fréchet spaces give a theory of global approximation? When sampling functions, ... [Read more...]

“The only good Monte Carlos are the dead Monte Carlos” (Trotter and Tukey, quoted by Halton) When I presented my [partial] history of MCM methods in Bristol two months ago, at the Julian Besag memorial, Christophe Andrieu mentioned a 1970 SIAM survey by John Halton on A retrospective and prospective survey ... [Read more...]

I received at last my weekend edition of Le Monde and hence the solution proposed by the authors (Cohen and Busser) to the puzzle #14. They obtain a strategy that only requires at most 19 steps. The idea is to start with a first test, which gives a reference score S0, and ... [Read more...]

The March 2011 issue of JASA contains a review of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R by Hedibert Lopes. As in the previous review, the poor quality of the figures is (rightly) pointed out by Hedie. However, the main message of the review remains very positive and, furthermore, Hedie advertises the ‘... [Read more...]

Although the official deadline is long past, I just became aware of this call for a postdoctoral position in Paris starting next Fall. Please feel free to apply: Summary Adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are currently a very active field of research. MCMC methods are sampling methods, based ... [Read more...]

Here is an email that could appeal to some readers: Job in Cambridge MRC-BSU – Bayesian statistician Career development fellow MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge We are offering an exciting opportunity to work on Bayesian models for infectious disease dynamics. A statistician is required to contribute to a programme of research to ... [Read more...]

Following the comments on our earlier submission to PNAS, we have written (and re-arXived) a revised version where we try to spell out (better) the distinction between ABC point (and confidence) estimation and ABC model choice, namely that the problem was at another level for Bayesian model choice (using posterior ... [Read more...]

A link on R-bloggers signaled a series of blogs and videos by IBM Netezza about Thomas Bayes and the consequences of his theorem. Which made me realise this was indeed the 250th anniversary of his death, and that maybe we (as a collective, incl. ISBA) should have done something on ... [Read more...]

For my second lecture today, I need to plot a likelihood surface for a basic two-component mixture with only the means unknown: here is the R code to speed up things llsurf=function(trumyn=2.,wayt=.3,var2=1.,ssiz=500){ # draws the log-likelihood surface and a random sample sd2=sqrt(var2) parti=(runif(... [Read more...]

As I already did two years ago, in connection with the double degree between UAM and Dauphine, I will give a short graduate course at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM). It will be part of the regular fourth year statistics course and will focus on mixtures, as given in ... [Read more...]

In what seems like an endless cuRse, I found this week I had to re-grade a dozen R exams a TA’s did not grade properly! The grades I (X) got are plotted below against those of my TA (Y). There is little connection between both gradings… As if this ... [Read more...]

This morning, I noticed that none of my R related posts had appeared on R-bloggers for the past fortnight… After investigating, this was caused by…cut-and-paste! Indeed, when advertising about the special issue of TOMACS Arnaud Doucet and I edit about Monte Carlo methods in Statistics, I copied the main ... [Read more...]

I received this email last week from Ian Langmore, a postdoc in Columbia: I’m looking for literature on a subject and can’t find it:  I have a Metropolis sampler where the acceptance probability is evaluated with some error.  This error is not simply error in evaluation of the ... [Read more...]

After posting so many entries about typos in my books (making you wonder how there could be any text left!) and postponing their classification for so long, I decided on Saturday afternoon to collect those entries into a comprehensive pdf document that should be more useful for readers. I incidentally ... [Read more...]

For its 20th anniversary, JCGS offers free access to papers, including Andrew’s discussion paper Why tables are really much better than graphs. (Another serious ending for an April fool joke!) Incidentally (or rather coincidentally), I received today the great news that our Using parallel computation to improve Independent Metropolis-Hastings ... [Read more...]

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TOMACS (ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation) is launching a call for paper submission. The special topic is Monte Carlo Methods in Statistics and Arnaud Doucet and myself are the special issue editors. Here are the details.: Over the last two decades Monte Carlo methods have attracted much attention ... [Read more...]