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...]

Check them out. Here are thirty homoskedastic ones: __ homo.wiener for (j in 1:30) {  for (i in 2:length(homo.wiener)) {          homo.wiener[i,j] for (j in 1:30) {        plot( homo.wiener[,j],           type = "l", col = rgb(.1,.... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

In the previous post (here) discussing forecasts of actuarial quantities, I did not mention much how to forecast the temporal component in the Lee-Carter model. Actually, many things can be done. Consider here some exponential smoothing techniques ... [Read more...]

A new Metropolis-Hastings algorithm that I would call “universal” was posted by Somak Dutta yesterday on arXiv. Multiplicative random walk Metropolis-Hastings on the real line contains a different Metropolis-Hastings algorithm called the random dive. The proposed new value x’ given the current value x is defined by when is a ... [Read more...]

Matt Asher posted an R experiment on R-bloggers yesterday simulating the random walk which has the property of avoiding zero by quickly switching to a large value as soon as is small. He was then wondering about the “convergence” of the random walk given that it moves very little once ... [Read more...]

If you are used to object oriented programing in a different language, the way R does things can seem a little strange and backwards. “proto” to the rescue. With this library you can simulate “normal” OOP. I found the examples for proto not so helpful, so to figure out how ... [Read more...]

Following my remarks on the t-walk algorithm in the recent A General Purpose Sampling Algorithm for Continuous Distributions, published by Christen and Fox in Bayesian Analysis that acts like a general purpose MCMC algorithm, Darren Wraith tested it on the generic (10 dimension) banana target we used in the cosmology paper. ... [Read more...]

When I read in the abstract of the recent A General Purpose Sampling Algorithm for Continuous Distributions, published by Christen and Fox in Bayesian Analysis that We develop a new general purpose MCMC sampler for arbitrary continuous distributions that requires no tuning. I am slightly bemused. The proposal of the ... [Read more...]