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 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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

[Read more...]

I spent most of my Saturday perusing R codes to check the answers written by my students to the R exam I gave two weeks ago… The outcome is mostly poor, even though some managed to solve a fair part of the long problem. Except for the few hopeless cases ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

A few days after my R exam (available in French here), I received this email from the department secretary: Pour information cet étudiant est venu me trouver jeudi soir, catastrophé car il venait de constater que son stylo “PILOT Frixion”, stylo semble-t-il recommandé par certains enseignants, ne se contentait pas ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]