Recently, I received comments (here and on Twitter) about my previous graphs on the temperature in Paris. I mentioned in a comment (there) that studying extremas (and more generally quantiles or interquantile evolution) is not the same as studying ...

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...

Following the idea posted on James Cheshire's blog (here), I have tried to play a little bit with R and Google. And it works ! Consider for instance life expectancy at birth (that can be found - and downloaded - here). Using the following code, it ...

In Lost, Hugo “Hurley” Reyes played the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 at the lottery, and ended up winning the $114-million jackpot. And over the ensuing weeks, everyone around him seems to suffer increasingly bad luck: Hurley’s grandfathe...

Just after arriving in Montréal, at the beginning of September, I discussed statistics of my blog, and said that it might be possible - or likely - that by new year's Eve, over a million page would have been viewed on my blog (from Google's count...

In a recent post (here, by @teramonagi), Teramonagi mentioned the use of PCA to model yield curve, i.e. to obtain the three factor, "parallel shift", "twist" and "butterfly". As in Nelson & Siegel, if m is maturity, is the yield of the cu...

As mentioned already here, while we were going to Québec City for the workshop, we had interesting discussions in the car, and Maciej mentioned an article recently published in The Actuary, Hence, I wanted to discuss (extremely) rare event probabi...