Monte Carlo Statistical Methods

slides for my simulation course

October 18, 2012 | xi'an

Similar to last year, I am giving a series of lectures on simulation jointly as a Master course in Paris-Dauphine and as a 3rd year course in ENSAE. The course borrows from both the books Monte Carlo Statistical Methods and from Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods with R, with George ... [Read more...]

Course at Monash (#2)

July 19, 2012 | xi'an

Here are the slides for the second day of my course at Monash University, Melbourne, in the Special Lectures in Econometrics, with a strong strong similarity with the slides of my course in Roma this Spring. (Ah, sunny Roma…) The first day lecture was very well attended and I hope ... [Read more...]

Course at Monash (#1)

July 18, 2012 | xi'an

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...]

\STATE [algorithmic package]

June 7, 2012 | xi'an

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...]

ABC+EL=no D(ata)

May 27, 2012 | xi'an

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...]

IS vs. self-normalised IS

March 11, 2012 | xi'an

I was grading my Master projects this morning and came upon this graph: which compares the variability of an importance-sampling estimator versus its self-normalised alternative… This is an interesting case in that self-normalisation does considerably degrade the quality of the approximation in that setting. In other cases, self-normalisation may bring ... [Read more...]

another X’idated question

February 23, 2012 | xi'an

An X’idated reader of Monte Carlo Statistical Methods had trouble with our Example 3.13, the very one our academic book reviewer disliked so much as to “diverse [sic] a 2 star”. The issue is with computing the integral when f is the Student’s t(5) distribution density. In our book, we ... [Read more...]

recents advances in Monte Carlo Methods

February 8, 2012 | xi'an

Next Thursday (Jan. 16), at the RSS, there will be a special half-day meeting (afternoon, starting at 13:30) on Recent Advances in Monte Carlo Methods organised by the General Application Section. The speakers are Richard Everitt, University of Oxford, Missing data, and what to do about it Anthony Lee, Warwick University, Auxiliary ... [Read more...]

Andrew gone NUTS!

November 23, 2011 | xi'an

Matthew Hoffman and Andrew Gelman have posted a paper on arXiv entitled “The No-U-Turn Sampler: Adaptively Setting Path Lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo” and developing an improvement on the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm called NUTS (!). Here is the abstract: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) ... [Read more...]

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...]

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...]

workshop in Columbia [day 3]

September 26, 2011 | xi'an

Although this was only a half-day of talks, the third day of the workshop was equally thought-challenging and diverse.  (I managed to miss the ten first minutes by taking a Line 3 train to 125th street, having overlooked the earlier split from Line 1… Crossing south Harlem on a Sunday morning 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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

MCMC with errors

March 25, 2011 | xi'an

I received this email last week from Ian Langmore, a postdoc in Columbia: I’m looking for literature on a subject and can’t find it:  I have a Metropolis sampler where the acceptance probability is evaluated with some error.  This error is not simply error in evaluation of the ... [Read more...]

Typos sorted, at last!

March 23, 2011 | xi'an

After posting so many entries about typos in my books (making you wonder how there could be any text left!) and postponing their classification for so long, I decided on Saturday afternoon to collect those entries into a comprehensive pdf document that should be more useful for readers. I incidentally ... [Read more...]

Missing reference in Monte Carlo Statistical Methods

January 15, 2011 | xi'an

A few days ago, Peng Yu sent me this email Dear Prof. Robert, The citation Edwards and Sokal (1988) appears on page 326 of your book MCSM2. However, I don’t find in in the Reference section (it would have appear on page 601 if it is in the reference section). I don’...
[Read more...]
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