Here is a message sent by the organisers of MCMSki III in Utah next early January. When registering, make sure to tick the free registration for Adap’skiii as well! The fourth joint international meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis), nicknamed “... [Read more...]

Over the two days of the Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology workshop, we managed to cover normal models, testing, regression, Gibbs sampling, generalised linear models, Metropolis-Hastings algorithms and of course a fair dose of hierarchical modelling. At the end of the Saturday marathon session, we spent one and half discussing ... [Read more...]

I did some poking and prodding of the polling place data, looking at the way Green support is highly concentrated in the inner-capital cities (and in Melbourne and Sydney, in particular). There are a few interesting exceptions that will make sense to... [Read more...]

The post on the shortcomings of R has attracted a huge number of readers and Ross Ihaka has now posted a detailed comment that is fairly pessimistic… Given the directions drafted in this comment from the father of R (along with Robert Gentleman), I once again re-post this comment as ... [Read more...]

The AEC makes this reasonably easy, as do the authors of some very helpful R packages, the good people at Google Maps etc. Full description here (PDF); entire collection here; a sample here, showing Green 1st preferences, by polling places across metro... [Read more...]

Yesterday night, we started the  Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology workshop by trading stories. Everyone involved in the programme discussed his/her favourite dataset and corresponding expectations from the course. I found the exchange most interesting, like the one we had two years ago in Gran Paradiso, because of the ... [Read more...]

Today I am travelling from Paris to Banff, via Amsterdam and Calgary, to take part in the Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology two day workshop organised at BIRS by Devin Goodsman (University of Alberta),  François Teste (University of Alberta), and myself. I am very excited both by the opportunity ... [Read more...]

Gilles Guillot from Technical University of Denmark taught a course based on our R book and he pointed out to me several typos in Chapter 5 of “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R”: p.137 second equation from bottom should be [right, another victim of cut-and-paste] p. 138  Example 5.7 denominator in the gradient ... [Read more...]

Julien Cornebise posted a rather detailed set of comments (from Jasper!) that I thought was interesting and thought-provoking enough (!) to promote to a guest post. Here it is , then, to keep the debate rolling (with my only censoring being the removal of smileys!). (Please keep in mind that I do ... [Read more...]

I picked up the AT&T Laboratories Cambridge database of faces for a clustering application. The database consists of images of 40 distinct subjects, each in 10 different facial positions and expressions. Typically, the goal of clustering in these data is to recover the ‘true’ partition, or that which isolates images of ... [Read more...]

Having purchased the September edition of La Recherche because of its (disappointing!) coverage on black matter, I came by a short coverage on an Intel circuit producing “truly random” numbers… I already discussed this issue in an earlier post, namely that there is no reason physical generators are “more” random ... [Read more...]

Having missed the earliest entry by Radford last month, due to disconnection in Yosemite, I was stunned to read his three entries of the past month about R performances being significantly modify when changing brackets with curly brackets! I (obviously!) checked on my own machine and found indeed the changes ... [Read more...]

Introduction I’ve just uploaded a new package to CRAN based on a stimulus generation algorithm that I use for my experiments on vision. The FourierDescriptors package provides methods for creating, manipulating and visualizing Fourier descriptors, which are a representational scheme used to describe closed planar contours. The canonical reference ... [Read more...]

In the wake of the main machine learning NIPS 2010 meeting in Vancouver, Dec. 6-9 2010, there will be a very interesting workshop organised by Ryan Adams, Mark Girolami, and Iain Murray on Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian Inference in Modern Day Applications, on Dec. 10. (And in Whistler, not Vancouver!) I wish ... [Read more...]

A collective blog has been started by the statistics students and postdocs at CREST, in the wake of the Valencia meeting. It is called Statisfaction. (The Rolling Stones of Statistics?! Actually, Andrew Gelman also has a post with that title… And it is even part of the Urban Dictionnary!) Since ... [Read more...]

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This is very short notice, but for those in the vicinity and not at the RSS conference, there is a highly interesting workshop taking place in Bristol in ten days (I would certainly have gone, had I not been at the same time in Banff!): We would like to invite ... [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...]

Earlier this month, Daniel Sabanés Bové and Leo Held posted a paper about g-priors on arXiv. While I glanced at it for a few minutes, I did not have the chance to get a proper look at it till last Sunday. The g-prior was first introduced by the late ... [Read more...]

I was reading an old post that describes GEOmetadb, a downloadable database containing metadata from the GEO database. We had a brief discussion in the comments about the growth in GSE records (user-submitted) versus GDS records (curated datasets) over time. Below, some quick and dirty R code to examine the ... [Read more...]