Publications by xi'an
registration open for BayesComp 2025
The registration for the incoming, exciting, Bayes Comp 2025 conference (and its satellites) is now open, including information regarding accommodations for the conference. Early bird rates run till 15 March. Furthermore, the call for contributed talks is open till 17 February. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and...
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Monte Carlo [exam]
My final exam for the Monte Carlo course I taught last semester proved too much of a challenge for my fourth year students, despite being rather elementary and centred on accept-reject algorithms and importance/bridge sampling. One of the problems was a decomposition of the truncated Normal simulation method proposed by Marsaglia in 1963, found on ...
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Nice meeting!
The ICSDS 2024 meeting in Nice is quite impressive and not primarily because it is in Nice under a beautiful December sun. As other (numerous) IMS meetings I attended (since the initial one in Uppsala in 1990!), the program is of high quality and along topics that are currently moving fast or emerging. From the sessions I attended, e-values are str...
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xkcd’atorics
Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Xi'an's Og. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job. Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if ...
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filogenesi della pasta ripiena
Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Xi'an's Og. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job. Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if ...
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the polls weren’t wrong [book review]
While Nate Silver and his colleagues (as The New York Times Nate Cohn) have brought (part of) the general public to adopt a (more) scientific perspective on political polls, the way to combine them, and the need to keep uncertainty fully quantified (witness this recent “Two Theories for Why the Polls Failed in 2020, and What It Means for 2024” ...
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Hands-On Differential Privacy [book review]
Hands-On Differential Privacy was published just a few months ago (from September 2024!) by (the US publisher) O’Reilly, famous for its programming and technical books with animal covers! A slate pencil sea urchin in the present case. The book is indeed classical O’Reilly’s, with lots of notes, little theory (or maths!) and symbols, a loose...
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joint fiddlin
Flip a fair coin 100 times, resulting in a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does, so e.g. for the subsequence THHHT Alice gets 2 points and Bob gets 1 point. Who is most likely to win? An interesting conundrum in that the joint distribution of (A,B) need be considered for showin...
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python [book review]
A fellow coder shared with me this recent manual (in French) entitled python (for the computer language, not the snake) written by Nathalie Azoulai as he found it an interesting literary (if not computer) program. It parses rather quickly and I compiled it in one single run on my way to Bristol [Mecca of punched card coders!] last week. The core ...
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[very] simple rejection Monte Carlo
“In recent years, the Rejection Monte Carlo (RMC) algorithm has emerged sporadically in literature under alternative names such as screening sampling or reject-accept sampling algorithms” First, I was intrigued enough by a new arXival spotted in the Thalys train from Brussels to take a deeper look at it, but soon realised there was nothing of ...
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