Publications by xi'an
A summer of books
The summer started with a research in pair session in CiRM on the R edition of Bayesian Core, but I am also involved two other book projects. The first one was mentioned in a previous post, namely the translation of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R into French. I have now recovered all translated chapters, involving not less than si...
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IMIS & AMIS
A most interesting paper by Adrian Raftery and Le Bao appeared in the Early View section of Biometrics. It aims at better predictions for HIV prevalence—in the original UNAIDS implementation, a naïve SIR procedure was used, based on the prior as importance function, which sometimes resulted in terrible degeneracy—, but its methodologic...
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StatProb [wiki]
Via the [financial and technical] support of Springer, probability and statistics societies are launching a specialised wiki called StatProb. It operates as a wiki in that authors can submit short articles on any topic, with further co-authors joining in later to improve those articles, but with the contents guaranteed via the filter of an editor...
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JSM 2010 [day 1]
The first day at JSM is always a bit sluggish, as people slowly drip in and get their bearings. Similar to last year in Washington D.C., the meeting takes place in a huge conference centre and thus there is no feeling of overcrowded [so far]. It may also be that the peripheric and foreign location of the meeting put some regular attendees off (no...
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JSM 2010 [day 2]
After a very good early run in Stanley Park, I went to a morning session on new statistical challenges in genetics, but unfortunately could not keep focussed enough (due to a very short night, still being not tuned to Pacific time!) so I ended up chatting with Sid Chib at the Springer booth about the future of R and the drawback of it running too...
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JSM 2010 [day 3]
The same pattern as yesterday occurred, namely that the sessions that most interested me were all together at the 10:30 and 2pm slots, while there was no talk (besides the official ones) after 4pm… After another run around Stanley Park, I took the opportunity of being late for the first session to sit outside and to read the beginning of Franci...
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Recent arXiv postings
With too little time, too many things to do on my plate, here are some recent arXiv postings I won’t have time to comment: Adaptive Monte Carlo on multivariate binary sampling spaces. (arXiv:1008.0055v1) Mixture Decomposition of Distributions using a Decomposition of the Sample Space. (arXiv:1008.0204v1) Bayesian Model Selection for Beta Autor...
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Julian Besag 1945-2010
I have just learned that Julian Besag passed away last morning in Bristol after being admitted to the hospital two weeks ago. He was a leading figure of our field, a fiercely independent thinker, a brilliant statistician, and undoubtedly the clearest pretendent to having fathered MCMC. His influence on the field of spatial statistics will be felt...
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Beta translation done!
Once my team of four translators had handed back to me all the chapters of the French version of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R to me, I had to go over the book to ensure some minimal consistency between the chapters. I started the editing in the plane to Vancouver but did not get much done until last Monday when arriving in Long Beach....
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Hyper-g priors
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 Arnold Zellner for (standard) linear models, but they can be extended to generalised linear mode...
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