Publications by xi'an
NIPS 2010: Monte Carlo workshop
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 I could attend, but going to a conf...
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In{s}a(ne)!!
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 in system.time uncovered by Radford…...
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Truly random?!
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 than congruential pseudo...
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Julien on R shortcomings
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 not endorse everything stated in this guest post! ...
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Typo in Chapter 5
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 should be 2*beta [yes,...
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Off to Banff!!
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 to meet young researchers in ecology and f...
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10w2170, Banff
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 diversity of approa...
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“simply start over and build something better”
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 a main entry to advertise more broadly its contents. (Obviousl...
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10w2170, Banff [2]
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 some models...
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News on MCMSki III
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 “MCMSki III“, will be ...
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