Martin Kilbinger, an astronomer (cosmologist) with whom we had worked on population Monte Carlo for cosmological inference [during the ANR-05-BLAN-0283- 04 ANR ECOSSTAT grant], has made the PMC C codes available on the CosmoPMC webpage. He has also written a CosmoPMC manual that is now available from arXiv. And ...

With Jean-Michel Marin, Pierre Pudlo and Robin Ryder, we just completed a survey on the ABC methodology. It is now both arXived and submitted to Statistics and Computing. Rather interestingly, our first draft was written in Jean-Michel’s office in Montpelier by collating the ‘Og posts surveying new ABC papers! (...

David Scott wrote a review of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R in the International Statistical Review that is rather negative, since the main bulk reads as follows: I found some aspects of the book very disappointing. The first chapter (“Basic R Programming”) has some unfortunate mistakes and some statements, ...

Another exciting day at Adap’skiii!!! Yves Atchadé presented a very recent work on the fundamental issue of estimating the asymptotic variance estimation for adaptive MCMC algorithms, with an intriguing experimental observation that a non-converging bandwidth with rate 1/n was providing better coverage than the converging rate. (I always found ...

Following Ashley’s latest comments on Chapter 5 of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R, I realised Example 5.5 was totally off-the-mark! Not only the representation of the likelihood should have used prod instead of mean, not only the constant should call the val argument of integrate, not only integrate  uses lower ...

The conference in honour of Larry Brown was quite exciting, with lots of old friends gathered in Philadelphia and lots of great talks either recollecting major works of Larry and coauthors or presenting fairly interesting new works. Unsurprisingly, a large chunk of the talks was about admissibility and minimaxity, with ...