Publications by xi'an
[summer Astrostat school] room with a view [jatp]
I just arrived in Autrans, on the Plateau du Vercors overlooking Grenoble and the view is fabulistic! Trees have started to turn red and yellow, the weather is very mild, and my duties are restricted to teaching ABC to a group of enthusiastic astronomers and cosmologists..! Second advanced course on ABC in the mountains this year, hard to beat (e...
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Astrostatistics school
What a wonderful week at the Astrostat [Indian] summer school in Autrans! The setting was superb, on the high Vercors plateau overlooking both Grenoble [north] and Valence [west], with the colours of the Fall at their brightest on the foliage of the forests rising on both sides of the valley and a perfect green on the fields at the centre, with s...
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splitting a field by annealing
A recent riddle [from The Riddle] that I pondered about during a [long!] drive to Luxembourg last weekend was about splitting a square field into three lots of identical surface for a minimal length of separating wire… While this led me to conclude that the best solution was a T like separation, I ran a simulated annealing R code on my train tr...
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computational methods for numerical analysis with R [book review]
This is a book by James P. Howard, II, I received from CRC Press for review in CHANCE. (As usual, the customary warning applies: most of this blog post will appear later in my book review column in CHANCE.) It consists in a traditional introduction to numerical analysis with backup from R codes and packages. The early chapters are setting the sce...
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Le Monde [last] puzzle [#1026]
The last and final Le Monde puzzle is a bit of a disappointment, to wit: A 4×4 table is filled with positive and different integers. A 3×3 table is then deduced by adding four adjacent [i.e. sharing a common corner] entries of the original table. Similarly with a 2×2 table, summing up to a unique integer. What is the minimal value of this int...
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bridgesampling [R package]
Quentin F. Gronau, Henrik Singmann and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers have arXived a detailed documentation about their bridgesampling R package. (No wonder that researchers from Amsterdam favour bridge sampling!) [The package relates to a [52 pages] tutorial on bridge sampling by Gronau et al. that I will hopefully comment soon.] The bridge sampling metho...
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normal variates in Metropolis step
A definitely puzzled participant on X validated, confusing the Normal variate or variable used in the random walk Metropolis-Hastings step with its Normal density… It took some cumulated efforts to point out the distinction. Especially as the originator of the question had a rather strong a priori about his or her background: “I take issue wi...
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Le Monde puzzle [#1029]
A convoluted counting Le Monde mathematical puzzle: A film theatre has a waiting room and several projection rooms. With four films on display. A first set of 600 spectators enters the waiting room and vote for their favourite film. The most popular film is projected to the spectators who voted for it and the remaining spectators stay in the wai...
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sliced Wasserstein estimation of mixtures
A paper by Soheil Kolouri and co-authors was arXived last week about using Wasserstein distance for inference on multivariate Gaussian mixtures. The basic concept is that the parameter is estimated by minimising the p-Wasserstein distance to the empirical distribution, smoothed by a Normal kernel. As the general Wasserstein distance is quite cost...
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Le Monde puzzle [#1033]
A simple Le Monde mathematical puzzle after two geometric ones I did not consider: Bob gets a 2×3 card with three integer entries on the first row and two integer entries on the second row such that (i) entry (1,1) is 1, (ii) summing up subsets of adjacent entries produces all integers from 1 to 21. (Adjacent means sharing an index.) Deduce Bob...
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