10 days ago, a study published on http://www.annalsofepidemiology.org/ mentioned that "Death has a preference for birthdays" (as claimed in the title). The conclusion of the paper is that, in general, birthdays do not evoke a postponement mechanism... [Read more...]

Last week, @3wen (Ewen) helped me to write nice R functions to extract tweets in R and build datasets containing a lot of information. I've tried a couple of time on my own. Once on tweet contents, but it was not convincing and once on the activit... [Read more...]

Following previous posts on life contingencies and longevity and mortality models, I upload additional material for the short course at the 6th R/Rmetrics Meielisalp Workshop & Summer School on Computational Finance and Financial Engineeri... [Read more...]

A short post today based on recent work by @3wen (Ewen Galic, graduate Student in Rennes, spending a year in Montreal). Since we were working on a detailed French dataset (per commune), we needed a dataset containing a list all communes, with popu... [Read more...]

This week, I have seen on the internet (sorry, I cannot find proper references) the graph produced here on the right: which birthday is most likely ? The fact that I have no further information is important, since I do not know in which country suc... [Read more...]

Dependence in dimension 2 is difficult. But one has to admit that dimension 2 is way more simple than dimension 3 ! I recently rediscovered a nice paper, Langford, Schwertman & Owens (2001), on transitivity of the property of being positively c... [Read more...]

I have to admit, first, that finding Waldo has been a difficult task. And I did not succeed. Neither could I correctly spot his shirt (because actually, it was what I was looking for). You know, that red-and-white striped shirt. I guess it sho... [Read more...]

Yesterday, while I was attending the IFM2 conference, at HEC Montreal, I heard a nice talk about credit risk, and a comparison between contagion (or at least default correlation), for corporate and retail companies (in the US). And it was mentioned... [Read more...]

A couple of days ago, on Twitter, @alung mentioned an old post I did publish on this blog about open-data, explaining how difficult it was to get access to data in France (the post, published almost 18 months ago can be found here, in French).... [Read more...]

This Monday, during my talk on quantile regressions (at the Montreal R-meeting), we've seen how those nice graphs could be interpreted, with the evolution of the slope of the linear regression, as a function of the probability level. One illustrati... [Read more...]

This afternoon, I will be giving a two-hour talk at McGill on quantiles, quantile regressions, confidence regions, bagplots and outliers. Before defining (properly) quantile regressions, we will mention regression on (local) quantiles, as on the gr... [Read more...]

Following the two previous posts (here and there), on the number of people that don't get wet while playing with water pistols, consider now an indoor version, in a non-convex room (i.e. player behind wall are now, somehow, protected). In the previ... [Read more...]

Following the previous post, two additional remarks. Following a comment by @cosi, I have investigated quickly a binomial fit to the distribution of the number of people not getting wet, with a fixed number of players on the field. It looks like it... [Read more...]

A few days ago, http://www.futilitycloset.com/ published a short post based on the fourth problem of the 1987 Canadian Mathematical Olympiad (from on a problem from the 6th All Soviet Union Mathematical Competition in Voronezh, 1966). The problem i... [Read more...]

This evening, while I was about to wash the dishes, I heard my elders starting a game (call them Him and Her) Him: "I have picked - in my head - a number, lower than 50. Try to guess..." Her: "No way, too difficult..." Him: "You can try five differ... [Read more...]

Just imagine that your kids need some help, to prepare fishes for April 1st, like Her: "please, Daddy, help us to draw some fishes" Me: "Sure, Daddy is a champion, actually, I do that everyday at work: drawing fishes - and more generally nice stuf... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with a practitioner, working in some financial company, about ruin, and infinite time. And it remind me a weird result. Well, not a weird result, but a result I found disturbing, at first, when I was a stud... [Read more...]

We are currently experiencing an extremely hot month in Montréal (and more generally in North America). Looking at people having a beer, and starting the first barbecue of the year, I was wondering: if we asked people if global warming was a good ... [Read more...]

Visualization is a key to success in regression analysis. This is one of the (many) reasons I am also suspicious when I read an article with a quantitative (econometric) analysis without any graph. Consider for instance the following dataset, obtai... [Read more...]

First, let us recall a standard result from linear algebra: "real symmetric matrices are diagonalizable by orthogonal matrices". Thus, any variance-covariance matrix can be written since a variance-covariance matrix is also definite positive. In ... [Read more...]