Publications by xi'an

Bayesian adaptive sampling

05.12.2010

In the continuation of my earlier post on computing evidence, I read a very interesting paper by Merlise Clyde, Joyee Ghosh and Michael Littman, to appear in JCGS. It is called  Bayesian adaptive sampling for variable selection and model averaging. The sound idea at the basis of the paper is that, when one is doing variable selection (i.e. explo...

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Le Monde puzzle [49]

07.12.2010

Here is a quick-and-dirty solution to Le Monde puzzle posted a few days ago: the R code counts the number of winning tickets between 1 and N, and stops when there is a proportion of 10% of winning tickets. #winning ticket win=function(n){ #decimal digits decomposition x=rep(0,4) x[4]=n%%10 m=(n-x[4])/10 x[3]=m%%10 m=(m-x[3])/10 x[2]=m%%10 m=(m-...

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Bayesian model selection

07.12.2010

Last week, I received a box of books from the International Statistical Review, for reviewing them. I thus grabbed the one whose title was most appealing to me, namely Bayesian Model Selection and Statistical Modeling by Tomohiro Ando. I am indeed interested in both the nature of testing hypotheses or more accurately of assessing models, as discu...

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Truly random [again]

09.12.2010

“The measurement outputs contain at the 99% confidence level 42 new random bits. This is a much stronger statement than passing or not passing statistical tests, which merely indicate that no obvious non-random patterns are present.” arXiv:0911.3427 As often, I bought La Recherche in the station newsagent for the wrong reason! The cover of t...

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Adap’skiii [latest]

13.12.2010

Just to point out there still is room for more participants to the Adap’skiii workshop! We have now reached 60 participants for this Utah workshop and would welcome more, quite obviously! All participants are also free to present a poster on the evening of the 4th, in the bar. Filed under: pictures, R, Statistics, Travel, University life Tagged...

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Disas-tea-R at dawn

16.12.2010

This was bound to happen sooner or later, given my addiction to tea and sleepless nights, so I eventually managed to spill a cup of tea over my Mac… I had been working for a few hours in my hotel room in Philadelphia, completing an ABC paper with Jean-Michel Marin and Robin Ryder. We had been running experiments in R with Jean-Michel over the p...

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AMIS revised & resubmitted

18.12.2010

After a thorough revision that removed most of the theoretical attempts at improving our understanding of AMIS convergence, we have now resubmitted the AMIS paper to Scandinavian Journal of Statistics and arXived the new version as well. (I remind the reader that AMIS stands for adaptive mixture importance sampling and that it implements an adapt...

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Back from Philly

20.12.2010

The conference in honour of Larry Brown was quite exciting, with lots of old friends gathered in Philadelphia and lots of great talks either recollecting major works of Larry and coauthors or presenting fairly interesting new works. Unsurprisingly, a large chunk of the talks was about admissibility and minimaxity, with John Hartigan starting the ...

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Questions on the parallel Rao-Blackwellisation

21.12.2010

Pierre Jacob and I got this email from a student about our parallel Rao-Blackwellisation paper. Here are some parts of the questions and our answer: Although I understand how the strategy proposed in the paper helps in variance reduction, I do not understand why you set b=1 (mentioned in Section 3.2) and why it plays no role in the comparison. I...

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Poster at MCMSki III

28.12.2010

Here is the poster presented at MCMSki III next week by Pierre Jacob about our joint paper on parallelisation: Filed under: R, Statistics, Travel Tagged: Adapski, MCMC, MCMSki, Metropolis-Hastings, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, parallelisation, poster, simulation, Utah Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the lin...

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