# Posts Tagged ‘ statistics ’

## A Work of Art: Efron on Bayesian Inference

October 6, 2011
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(Contributing blogger Joseph Rickert reports from the Stanford University Statistics Seminar series - ed.) Stanford University is very gracious about letting the general public attend many university events. Yesterday, it caught my eye that Bradley Efron was going to speak on Bayesian inference and the parametric bootstrap at the weekly Statistics seminar. So, since the free shuttle that goes...

## Monitoring Productivity II – the Others

September 30, 2011
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In previous Monitoring Productivity Experiment post I looked into the hours I spent in computer, now will look into the hours Others spend in computer, which is far more interesting :) To find things like what day people spend more time on computer, ho...

## Bessel integral

September 28, 2011
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$Bessel integral$

Pierre Pudlo and I worked this morning on a distribution related to philogenic trees and got stuck on the following Bessel integral where In is the modified Bessel function of the first kind. We could not find better than formula 6.611(4) in Gradshteyn and Ryzhik. which is for a=0… Anyone in for a closed form

## workshop in Columbia [day 3]

September 26, 2011
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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 a fairly mild

## Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo

September 21, 2011
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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 to get a look at

## A Note on Antoniak’s Approximation for Dirichlet Processes

September 21, 2011
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Antoniak's 1974 article titled Mixtures of Dirichlet Processes with Applications to Bayesian Nonparametric Problems (Annals of Statistics 2(6):1152-1174) is a fundamental work for most modern developments in this area. The article gives two expressions for the expected number of distinct values in a sample of size n, drawn from a Dirichlet process-distributed probability distribution with

## Density exploration and Wang-Landau algorithms [with R package]

September 21, 2011
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Hey, Since a new paper that I’ve co-written has appeared on arXiv, here is a quick post summarizing it. The paper is named: An Adaptive Interacting Wang-Landau Algorithm for Automatic Density Exploration and describes improvements over the Wang-Landau algorithm described … Continue reading →

September 19, 2011
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Julien Cornebise has 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 (a 40% margin for Elsevier!)

## Why you should care about reproducible research

September 12, 2011
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This week's Economist has an in-depth article on the consequences of failures reproducible research, adding more detail to the report in the New York Times in July. Errors in data analysis by researchers at Duke University led to patients in clinical trials being assigned the wrong drug: Dr Potti and his colleagues had mislabelled the cell lines they used...

## Testing and significance

September 12, 2011
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Julien Cornebise pointed me to this Guardian article that itself summarises the findings of a Nature Neuroscience article I cannot access. The core of the paper is that a large portion of comparative studies conclude to a significant difference between protocols when one protocol result is significantly different from zero and the other one(s) is(are)