Here are the slides for the first day of my course at Monash University, Melbourne, in the Special Lectures in Econometrics, with a strong similarity with the slides of my course in Wharton, two years ago. (Be sure to check slide 67! If the update on slideshare works from my flat ... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Xi'an's Og » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

Following the crash of my hard drive right before leaving Kyoto, I bought a cheap Compaq Presario CQ57 to reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 over the weekend (and have a laptop available before leaving for Australia…)  It took about one hour to install from the DVD and everything seems to be working out ... [Read more...]

Yet another full day working on Bayesian Core with Jean-Michel in Carnon… This morning, I ran along the canal for about an hour and at last saw some pink flamingos close enough to take pictures (if only to convince my daughter that there were flamingos in the area!). Then I ... [Read more...]

Once again working on my slides for the AMSI Lecture 2012 tour, it took me a while to get the following LaTeX code (about the family reunion puzzle) to work: \begin{frame}[fragile,label=notleM2] \slidetitle{A family meeting} \begin{block}{Random switch of couples} \only{ \begin{itemize} \item Pick two ... [Read more...]

I fought with my LαTεX compiler this morning as it did not want to deal with my code: looking on forums for incompatibilities between beamer and algorithmic, and adding all kinds of packages, to no avail. Until I realised one \STATE was missing: (This is connected with my ... [Read more...]

A few more comments on the specific entry on ABC written by Mikael Sunnåker et al…. The entry starts with the representation of the posterior probability of an hypothesis, rather than with the posterior density of a model parameter, which seems to lead the novice reader astray. After all, (... [Read more...]

It took us a loooong while [for various and uninteresting reasons] but we finally ended up completing a paper on ABC using empirical likelihood (EL) that was started by me listening to Brunero Liseo’s tutorial in O’Bayes-2011 in Shanghai… Brunero mentioned empirical likelihood as a semi-parametric technique w/... [Read more...]

Robin Ryder pointed out to me this new experiment run by PLoS since March 2012, namely the introduction of a new article type, “called “Topic Pages” and written in the style of a Wikipedia article“. Not only this terrific idea gives more credence to Wikipedia biology pages, at least in their ... [Read more...]

This post is written by Julien Cornebise. Last week in Aachen was the 3rd Edition of the Bayes(Pharma) workshop. Its specificity: half-and-half industry/academic participants and speakers, all in Pharmaceutical statistics, with a great care to welcome newcomers to Bayes, so as to spread as much as possible the ... [Read more...]

As part of an on-going paper with Kerrie Mengersen and Pierre Pudlo, we are using a GARCH(1,1) model as a target. Thus, the model is of the form which is a somehow puzzling object: the latent (variance) part is deterministic and can be reconstructed exactly given the series and the ... [Read more...]

A recent arXiv posting of the paper “On the Generalized Ratio of Uniforms as a Combination of Transformed Rejection and Extended Inverse of Density Sampling” by Martino, Luengo, and Míguez from Madrid rekindled my interest in this rather peculiar simulation method. The ratio of uniforms samples uniformly on the ... [Read more...]

Being freshly elected ASA Fellow (yay!), I just received the list of 2012 ASA Fellows. Among whose, let me mention Sudipto Banerjee, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, elected “For theoretical, methodological and applied research in spatiotemporal statistical modeling, especially as applied to problems in environmetrics, ecology, occupational health, agriculture and economics, ... [Read more...]

We have now completed our revision of the paper Relevant statistics for Bayesian model choice, written with Judith Rousseau, Jean-Michel Marin, and Natesh Pillai. It has been resubmitted to Series B and reposted on arXiv. The major change in the paper is the inclusion of a check about the relevance ... [Read more...]

I spent most of the Sunday afternoon trying to understand why defining did not have the same effect as writing the line until I found there is a clash due to the comment package… The assuredly simple code produces an error message: This is quite an inconvenience as I need ... [Read more...]

In the motivating toy example to our ABC model choice paper, we compare summary statistics, mean, median, variance, and… median absolute deviation (mad). The latest is the only one able to discriminate between our normal and Laplace models (as now discussed on Cross Validated!). When rerunning simulations to produce nicer ... [Read more...]

Following the question on dinner table permutations on StackExchange (mathematics) and the reply that the right number was six, provided by hardmath, I was looking for a constructive solution how to build the resolvable 2-(20,5,1) covering. A few hours later. hardmath again came up with an answer, found in the ... [Read more...]

Paulo (from the Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil) has posted an answer to my earlier question both as a comment on the ‘Og and as a solution on StackOverflow (with a much more readable LaTeX output). His solution is based on the ... [Read more...]

Wondering about the question I posted on Friday (on StackExchange, no satisfactory answer so far!), I looked further at the special case of the gamma distribution I suggested at the end. Starting from the moment conditions, and the solution is (hopefully) given by the system The resolution of this system ... [Read more...]

On Tuesday, Eric Chi and Kenneth Lange arXived a paper on a comparison of numerical techniques for solving sudokus. (The very Kenneth Lange who wrote this fantastic book on numerical analysis.) One of these techniques is the simulated annealing approach I had played with a long while ago.  They seem ... [Read more...]