Publications by xi'an
CHANCE: special issue on George Casella’s books
The special issue of CHANCE on George Casella’s books has now appeared and it contains both my earlier post on George passing away and reviews of several of his books, as follows: Andrew Gelman on Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R Bill Strawderman on Statistical Inference Jean-Louis Foulley on Variance Components Larry Wasserman on The...
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dbetabinom versions
I got this email from a student: (1) I used the following R function in package “emdbook“ dbetabinom(x,prob,size,theta, shape1,shape2,log=FALSE) more precisely I did curve(dbetabinom(x,size=15,shape1=3,shape2=7),ylim=c(0,.12),xlim=c(0,10)) (2) instead I use the following R function in package “VGAM“ dbetabinom.ab(x,size,shape1,shape2,lo...
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Le Monde puzzle [#809]
Another number theory puzzle, completed in the plane to Hamburg: Integers n are called noble if they can be decomposed as a sum n=a+b+… of distinct integers such that 1/a+1/b+…=1. They are called bourgeois if they are not noble but can be decomposed as a sum n=a+b+… of integers, some of them identical, such that 1/a+1/b+…=1. If neither n...
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the BUGS Book [guest post]
(My colleague Jean-Louis Fouley, now at I3M, Montpellier, kindly agreed to write a review on the BUGS book for CHANCE. Here is the review, en avant-première! Watch out, it is fairly long and exhaustive! References will be available in the published version. The additions of book covers with BUGS in the title and of the corresponding Amazon link...
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making a random walk geometrically ergodic
While a random walk Metropolis-Hastings algorithm cannot be uniformly ergodic in a general setting (Mengersen and Tweedie, AoS, 1996), because it needs more energy to leave far away starting points, it can be geometrically ergodic depending on the target (and the proposal). In a recent Annals of Statistics paper, Leif Johnson and Charlie Geyer de...
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Le Monde puzzle [#810]
The current puzzle is as follows: Take a board with seven holes and seeds. The game starts with one player putting the seeds on the holes as he or she wishes. The other player picks a seed wherever. Then, alternatively, each player picks a seed in a hole contiguous to the previous one. The loser is the one finding only empty holes to pick from. ...
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MCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #4)
More news about MCMSki IV! Remember, the call is still open for contributed sessions for a few more weeks, till March. 20 to be precise (make sure to contact me at [email protected]l.com if you are considering putting one session together). To all those who already submitted a session, thanks a lot, please stay tuned, and we will contact you ver...
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workshop a Padova
Needless to say, it is with great pleasure I am back in beautiful Padova for the workshop Recent Advances in statistical inference: theory and case studies, organised by Laura Ventura and Walter Racugno. Esp. when considering this is one of the last places I met with George Casella, in June 2010. As we have plenty of opportunities to remember him...
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latent Gaussian model workshop in Reykjavik
An announcement for an Icelandic meeting next September, meeting I would have loved to attend (darn!)… This meeting is sponsored by the BayesComp session, of course!!! We are pleased to announce that the University of Iceland will host the 3rd Workshop on Bayesian Inference for Latent Gaussian Models with Applications (LGM). The workshop will ...
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Le Monde puzzle [#814]
The #814 Le Monde math puzzle was to find 100 digits (between 1 and 10) such that their sum is equal to their product. Given the ten possible values of those digits, this is equivalent to finding integers a1,…,a10 such that a1+…+a10=100 and a1+2a2+…+10a10=2a2x….x10a10, which reduces the number of unknowns from 100 to 10 (or even 9). Furth...
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