This week, at the Rmetrics conference, there has been an interesting discussion about heuristic optimization. The starting point was simple: in complex optimization problems (here we mean with a lot of local maxima, for instance), we do not ne...
Posts Tagged ‘ maxima ’
EU rules that computer languages cannot be copyrighted
The European Court of Justice has published its decision in SAS v WPL; the title of the press release says it all “The functionality of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright”. To summarise the background, World Programming Ltd developed a system that was capable of emulating the input/output behavior
MAT8886 Extremes and sums (of i.i.d. random variables)
Yesterday, we have discussed briefly sums and maximas of i.i.d. random variables using the concept of subexponential distributions. Today, we will introduce the concept of regular variation: a positive function is said to be regularly varying (at i...
More climate extremes, or simply global warming ?
In the paper on the heat wave in Paris (mentioned here) I discussed changes in the distribution of temperature (and autocorrelation of the time series). During the workshop on Statistical Methods for Meteorology and Climate Change today (here) I o...
Variations in the literal representation of Pi
The numbers system I am developing attempts to match numeric literals contained in a file against a database of interesting numbers. One of the things I did to quickly build a reasonably sized database of reliable values was to extract numeric literals from a few well known programs that I thought I could trust. R
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
