Publications by xi'an
Le Monde puzzle [52]
The last puzzle of the year in Le Monde reads as follows (as far as I understand its wording!): Iter(n,x,y) is the function Iter=function(n,x,y){ if (n==1){ output=trunc(y/10)+x*(y%%10) }else{ output=Iter(n-1,x,Iter(1,x,y))} return output } Find the seven-digit number z such that Iter(6,1,z)=12, Iter(6,2,z)=19, Iter(6,3,z)=29, and Iter(6...
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History makes Stat. Science!
While the above heading sounds like a title in reverse, its words are in the “correct” order in that our paper with George Casella, A Short History of Markov Chain Monte Carlo, has been accepted for publication by Statistical Science. This publication may sound weird when considering that the paper is also scheduled to appear in the Handbook ...
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Le Monde puzzle [52|solution]
I have now received the first issue of Le Monde magazine, including the solution to puzzle #52 I solved just in time by simulated annealing! The trick is in using the following theorem: Iter(1,x,y) is divisible by 10x-1 if and only if y is divisible by 10x-1. Then the value to be found is divisible by 3, but not by 9, by 19, by 29, by 11, by 3 an...
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Adap’skiii [day 2]
Another exciting day at Adap’skiii!!! Yves Atchadé presented a very recent work on the fundamental issue of estimating the asymptotic variance estimation for adaptive MCMC algorithms, with an intriguing experimental observation that a non-converging bandwidth with rate 1/n was providing better coverage than the converging rate. (I always found...
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Short review of the R book
David Scott wrote a review of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R in the International Statistical Review that is rather negative, since the main bulk reads as follows: I found some aspects of the book very disappointing. The first chapter (“Basic R Programming”) has some unfortunate mistakes and some statements, which are contentious at ...
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a survey on ABC
With Jean-Michel Marin, Pierre Pudlo and Robin Ryder, we just completed a survey on the ABC methodology. It is now both arXived and submitted to Statistics and Computing. Rather interestingly, our first draft was written in Jean-Michel’s office in Montpelier by collating the ‘Og posts surveying new ABC papers! (Interestingly because this mean...
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Arrogance sampling
A new posting on arXiv by Benedict Escoto on a simulation method for approximating normalising constants (i.e. evidence) with an eye-catching name! Here is the abstract This paper describes a method for estimating the marginal likelihood or Bayes factors of Bayesian models using non-parametric importance sampling (“arrogance sampling”). This...
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Le Monde puzzle [1]
Following the presentation of the first Le Monde puzzle of the year, I tried a simulated annealing solution on an early morning in my hotel room. Here is the R code, which is unfortunately too rudimentary and too slow to be able to tackle n=1000. #minimise sum_{i=1}^I x_i #for 1le x_ile 2n+1, 1e ile I # Ige n, x_i ne x_j # a=x_i,b=x_j...
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Two short Bayesian courses in South’pton
An announcement for two short-courses on Introduction to Bayesian Analysis and MCMC, and Hierarchical Modelling of Spatial and Temporal Data by Alan Gelfand (Duke University, USA) and Sujit Sahu (University of Southampton, UK), are to take place in Southampton on June 7-10, this year. Course 1: Introduction to Bayesian Analysis and MCMC. Date: ...
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CosmoPMC released
Martin Kilbinger, an astronomer (cosmologist) with whom we had worked on population Monte Carlo for cosmological inference [during the ANR-05-BLAN-0283- 04 ANR ECOSSTAT grant], has made the PMC C codes available on the CosmoPMC webpage. He has also written a CosmoPMC manual that is now available from arXiv. And he very kindly associated me to thi...
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