Books

Typos in Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods with R

October 12, 2011 | xi'an

The two translators of our book in Japanese, Kazue & Motohiro Ishida, contacted me about some R code mistakes in the book. The translation is nearly done and they checked every piece of code in the book, an endeavour for which I am very grateful! Here are the two issues they ... [Read more...]

R related books: Traditional vs online publishing

October 12, 2011 | mages

How many R related books have been published so far? Who is the most popular publisher? How many other manuals, tutorials and books have been published online? Let's find out. A few years ago I used the publication list on r-project.org as an argument ...
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understanding computational Bayesian statistics

October 9, 2011 | xi'an

I have just finished reading this book by Bill Bolstad (University of Waikato, New Zealand) which a previous ‘Og post pointed out when it appeared, shortly after our Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R. My family commented that the cover was nicer than those of my own books, which is ... [Read more...]

Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo

September 21, 2011 | xi'an

At JSM, John Kimmel gave me a copy of the Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo, as I had not (yet?!) received it. This handbook is edited by Steve Brooks, Andrew Gelman, Galin Jones, and Xiao-Li Meng, all first-class jedis of the MCMC galaxy. I had not had a chance ... [Read more...]

About commercial publishers

September 19, 2011 | xi'an

Julien Cornebise has [once again!] pointed out a recent Guardian article. It is about commercial publishers of academic journals, mainly Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley, with a clear stand from its title: “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist“! The valuable argument therein is that academic publishers make hefty profits (... [Read more...]

Bayes-250, Edinburgh [day 2]

September 6, 2011 | xi'an

After a terrific run this morning to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and then around (the ribs are feeling fine, now!), the Bayes-250 talks were exhilarating and challenging. Jim Smith gave an introduction to the challenges of getting different experts to collaborate on a complex risk assessment, much in ... [Read more...]

A misleading title…

September 4, 2011 | xi'an

When I received this book, Handbook of fitting statistical distributions with R, by Z. Karian and E.J. Dudewicz,  from/for the Short Book Reviews section of the International Statistical Review, I was obviously impressed by its size (around 1700 pages and 3 kilos…). From briefly glancing at the table of contents, ... [Read more...]

Posts of the year

August 30, 2011 | xi'an

Like last year, here are the most popular posts since last August: Home page 92,982 In{s}a(ne)!! 6,803 “simply start over and build something better” 5,834 Julien on R shortcomings 2,373 Parallel processing of independent Metropolis-Hastings algorithms 1,455 Do we need an integrated Bayesian/likelihood inference? 1,361 Coincidence in lotteries 1,256 #2 blog for the statistics ... [Read more...]

Numerical analysis for statisticians

August 25, 2011 | xi'an

“In the end, it really is just a matter of choosing the relevant parts of mathematics and ignoring the rest. Of course, the hard part is deciding what is irrelevant.” Somehow, I had missed the first edition of this book and thus I started reading it this afternoon with a ... [Read more...]

le logiciel R

August 24, 2011 | xi'an

For once, here is a book review I wrote in French about the book Le logiciel R, written by Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux (Université de Montréal), Rémy Drouilhet (Université de Grenoble 2) and Benoît Liquet (Université de Bordeaux 2): Ce livre édité par Springer (dans la même collection ... [Read more...]

Number of components in a mixture

August 5, 2011 | xi'an

I got a paper (unavailable online) to referee about testing for the order (i.e. the number of components) of a normal mixture. Although this is an easily spelled problem, namely estimate k in I came to the conclusion that it is a kind of ill-posed problem. Without a clear ... [Read more...]

JSM 2011 [3]

August 2, 2011 | xi'an

Monday August 01 was the first full day of JSM 2011 and full is the appropriate word to describe the day! It started for me at 7am with a round table run by Marc Suchard on parallel computing (or at 3am if I am considering the time I woke up!). I was ... [Read more...]

Core not in CiRM

July 27, 2011 | xi'an

Despite not enjoying this year the optimal environment of CiRM, we are still making good progress on the revision (or the R vision) of Bayesian Core. In the past two days, we went over Chapters 1 (Introduction), 2 (Normal Models), 5 (Capture-Recapture Experiments), and 6 (Mixture Models), with Chapters 3 (Regression), 4 (Generalised Linear Models) [...] [Read more...]

Bayesian Core and loose logs

July 26, 2011 | xi'an

Jean-Michel (aka Jean-Claude!) Marin came for a few days so that we could make late progress on the revision of our book Bayesian Core towards an Use R! version. In one of the R programs in the mixture chapter, we were getting improbable answers, until we found an R mistake ... [Read more...]

The foundations of Statistics [reply]

July 18, 2011 | xi'an

Shravan Vasishth has written a response to my review both published on the Statistics Forum. His response is quite straightforward and honest. In particular, he acknowledges not being a statistician and that he “should spend more time studying statistics”. I also understand the authors’ frustration at trying “to recruit several ... [Read more...]

The foundations of Statistics: a simulation-based approach

July 11, 2011 | xi'an

“We have seen that a perfect correlation is perfectly linear, so an imperfect correlation will be `imperfectly linear’.” page 128 This book has been written by two linguists, Shravan Vasishth and Michael Broe, in order to teach statistics “in  areas that are traditionally not mathematically demanding” at a deeper level than ... [Read more...]

Bounded target support

July 4, 2011 | xi'an

Here is an interesting question from Tomàs that echoes a lot of related emails: I’m turning to you for advice. I’m facing problem  where parameter space is bounded, e.g. all parameters have to be positive. If in MCMC as proposal distribution I use normal distribution, then ... [Read more...]

A dubious statistics

May 31, 2011 | xi'an

Following a link on R-bloggers, I ended up on this page (with a completely useless graph that only contained the pieces of information 5% in 1900 and 55% in 2000). The author (Ralph Keeney) reports on “A remarkable 55 percent of deaths for people age 15 to 64 can be attributed to decisions with readily [...] [Read more...]

Hammersley and Handscomb 1964 on line

May 26, 2011 | xi'an

Through the webpage of the Advanced Monte Carlo Methods I & II, given a few years ago by Michael Mascagni at ETH Zürich, I found a link to the scanned version of the 1964 book Monte Carlo Methods by Hammersley and Handscomb. This is a short book, with less than 150 pages, ... [Read more...]

Terry’s spiel

May 22, 2011 | xi'an

“We don’t need likelihood functions; we just need to know how to simulate from [them] (…) We don’t need models with sufficient statistics; we just need summary statistics (…) We don’t need to be Bayesian; we just need to be approximately so. We don’t need theory to tell ... [Read more...]
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