Publications by xi'an
Bayesian courses in København
I received this announcement about two incoming courses given in København by Andrew Lawson: 1) “*An Introduction to Bayesian Disease Mapping*” A Two-Day Course, April 12.- 13. 2010, University of Southern Denmark This course is designed to provide an introduction to the area of Bayesian disease mapping in applications to Public Health and E...
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Looking for a Bayésien PhD
I just got this email (yes, in French) looking for a Bayesian ready to work on algorithms: Dans le cadre de la société Vekia, nous recherchons un Docteur en statistiques bayésiennes pour un poste sur Lille à pourvoir dès que possible. Vekia est un éditeur de logiciel pour le commerce fondée en 2007 par deux chercheurs (Pierre-Arnaud COQU...
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Big’MC seminar
Two very interesting talks at the Big’ MC seminar on Thursday: – Phylogenetic models and MCMC methods for the reconstruction of language history by Robin Ryder – Uniform and non-uniform random generators by Régis Lebrun which are both on topics close to my interest, evolution of languages (I’ll be a philologist in another life!) and un...
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Congruential generators all are RANDUs!
In case you did not read all the slides of Regis Lebrun’s talk on pseudo-random generators I posted yesterday, one result from Marsaglia’s (in a 1968 PNAS paper) exhibited my ignorance during Regis’ Big’ MC seminar on Thursday. Marsaglia indeed showed that all multiplicative congruential generators lie on a series of hyperplanes whose nu...
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Updated R code for Bayesian Core
Simply to mention a minor change made in the prog4.R code for Bayesian Core. Nothing life-threatening, mind you!, just a term replacing a term… Filed under: Books, R, Statistics Tagged: Bayesian Core, R, R code, typo Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Xi'an's Og » R. R-blogg...
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Typos in Chapters 1, 4 & 8
Thomas Clerc from Fribourg pointed out an embarassing typo in Chapter 8 of “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R”, namely that I defined on page 247 the complex number as the squared root of 1 and not of -1! Not that this impacts much on the remainder of the book but still an embarassment!!! An inconsistent notation was uncovered by Bastie...
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Springer solution manuals on line
Springer Verlag has just posted on its webpage both the student and the instructor solution manuals to “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R”. Yes, both! Before you rush there, the Catch-22 in this announcement is that the access to the instructor version is restricted to registered instructors. So, if you are registered as an instructor wi...
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Joining R-bloggers
Upon request by the blog administrator, Tal Galili, I have joined R-bloggers, which aggregate blog entries about R into a central place. I feel I have much more to learn than to teach about R (as can be seen from earlier comments on my R programs in Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R). As I was tagging some of my older posts with the newly cr...
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R exam postprocessing
Following my three-fold R exam of last month, I had a depressing afternoon meeting (with other faculty members) some students who had submitted R codes that were suspiciously close to other submitted R codes… In other words, it looked very likely they had cheated. (A long-term issue with my R course, alas!) During this meeting, they actually ...
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Sudoku via simulated annealing
The Sudoku puzzle in this Sunday edition of Le Monde was horrendously difficult, so after spending one hour with only 4 entries filled, I decided to feed it to the simulated annealing R program I wrote while visiting SAMSI last year. The R program reached the exact (and only) solution in about 6000 iterations, as shown (?) on the graph above. The...
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