A quite simple Le Monde mathematical puzzle again with Alice and Bob: In a multiple choice questionnaire with 50 questions, Alice gets a score s such that Bob can guess how many correct (+5 points), incorrect (-1 point) and missing (0 point) Alice got when adding that Alice could not have gotten s-2 ...

An interesting question came up on X validated a few days ago: given a probability vector p=(p¹,…,p⁷), is there a way to pick 5 values in {1,…,7} without replacement and still preserve the probability repartition in the resulting sample? In other words, is there a sampling without replacement strategy that ...

“I have decided that mixtures, like tequila, are inherently evil and should be avoided at all costs.” L. Wasserman Larry Wasserman once remarked that finite mixtures were like the twilight zone of statistics, thanks to the numerous idiosyncrasies associated with such models. And George Casella had similar strong reservations about ...

Alex Thiéry suggested debiasing the biased estimate of e by Rhee and Glynn truncated series method, so I tried the method to see how much of an improvement (if any!) this would bring. I first attempted to naïvely implement the raw formula of Rhee and Glynn with a (...

In the wake of my earlier post on the Monte Carlo estimation of e and e⁻¹, after a discussion with my colleague Murray Pollock (Warwick) Gnedenko’s solution, he pointed out another (early) Monte Carlo approximation called Forsythe’s method. That is detailed quite neatly in Luc Devroye’s bible, ...

A rather exotic question on X validated: since π can be approximated by random sampling over a unit square, is there an equivalent for approximating e? This is an interesting question, as, indeed, why not focus on e rather than π after all?! But very quickly the very artificiality of the problem ...

Another boardgame in Le Monde mathematical puzzle : Given an 8×8 chequerboard,  consider placing 2×2 tiles over this chequerboard until (a) the entire surface is covered and (b) removing a single 2×2 tile exposes some of the original chequerboard. What is the maximal number of 2×2 tiles one can set according to this scheme? And ...

Hyungsuk Tak, Xiao-Li Meng and David van Dyk just arXived a paper on a multiple choice proposal in Metropolis-Hastings algorithms towards dealing with multimodal targets. Called “A repulsive-attractive Metropolis algorithm for multimodality” [although I wonder why XXL did not jump at the opportunity to use the “love-hate” denomination!]. The proposal ...

When discussing high dimension models with Ingmar Schüster Schuster [blame my fascination for accented characters!] the other day, we came across the following paradox with Metropolis-Hastings algorithms. If attempting to simulate from a multivariate standard normal distribution in a large dimension, when starting from the mode of the target, ...

After the MCqMC 2014 conference in Leuven I enjoyed very much, the MCqMC 2016 instalment takes place in Stanford this (late) summer. I cannot alas attend it, as I will be in Australia all summer winter, but the program looks terrific! As Art’s tutorial so brilliantly showed at MCMskv last week, ...

While browsing Images des Mathématiques, I came across this article [in French] that studies the impact of round-off errors on number representations in a dynamical system and checked how much this was the case for MCMC algorithms like the slice sampler (recycling some R code from Monte Carlo Statistical ...

As I am flying back to Paris (with an afternoon committee meeting in München in-between), I am reminiscing on the superlative scientific quality of this MCMski meeting, on the novel directions in computational Bayesian statistics exhibited therein, and on the potential settings for the next meeting. If any. First, ...

After presenting this work in both London and Lenzerheide, Kaniav Kamary, Kate Lee and I arXived and submitted our paper on a new parametrisation of location-scale mixtures. Although it took a long while to finalise the paper, given that we came with the original and central idea about a year ...

Tuesday at MCMSkv was a rather tense day for me, from having to plan the whole day “away from home” [8km away] to the mundane worry of renting ski equipment and getting to the ski runs over the noon break, to giving a poster over our new mixture paper with ...

If you remember the previous post, I had two interpretations about Le Monde mathematical puzzle #639: Find all integers with less than 11 digits that are perfect squares and can be written as a(a+6), a being an integer. and: Find all integers with less than 11 digits that are perfect squares and ...