Yet another puzzle which first part does not require R programming, even though it is a programming question in essence: Given five real numbers x1,…,x5, what is the minimal number of pairwise comparisons needed to rank them? Given 33 real numbers, what is the minimal number of pairwise comparisons required to find the three largest ones? […]
I just updated my short review on Bayesian computational tools I first wrote in April for the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Applications. The coverage is quite restricted, as I took advantage of two phantom papers I had started a while ago, one with Jean-Michel Marin, on hierarchical Bayes methods and on ABC. (As […]
A rather dull puzzle this week: Show that, for any integer y, (√3-1)2y+(√3+1)2y is an integer multiple of a power of two. I just have to apply Newton’s binomial theorem to obtain the result. What’s the point?! Filed under: Books, Kids...
For once Le Monde math puzzle is much more easily solved on a piece of paper than in R, even in a plane from Roma: Given a partition of the set {1,…,N} in k groups, one considers the collection of all subsets of the set {1,…,N} containing at least one element from each group. Show […]
In a paper arXived on Friday, Roberto Fontana relates the generation of Sudoku grids to the one of Latin squares (which is unsurprising) and to maximum cliques of a graph (more surprising). The generation of a random Latin square proceeds in three steps: generate a random Latin square L with identity permutation matrix on symbol […]
![accurate ABC: comments by Oliver Ratman [guest post]](http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/xianblog.wordpress.com/20814/)
Here are comments by Olli following my post: I think we found a general means to obtain accurate ABC in the sense of matching the posterior mean or MAP exactly, and then minimising the KL distance between the true posterior and its ABC approximation subject to this condition. The construction works on an auxiliary probability […]
The current puzzle is… puzzling: Given the set {1,…,N} with N<61, one iterates the following procedure: take (x,y) within the set and replace the pair with the smallest divider of x+y (bar 1). What are the values of N such that the final value in the set is 61? I find it puzzling because the […]
Here is the cover of the Japanese translation of our Introducing Monte Carlo methods with R book. A few year after the French translation. It actually appeared last year in August but I was not informed of this till a few weeks ago. The publisher is Maruzen, with an associated webpage if you want to […]
Following Le Monde puzzle #810, I tried to code an R program (not reproduced here) to optimise an awalé game but the recursion was too rich for R: even with a very small number of holes and seeds in the awalé… Searching on the internet, it seems the computer simulation of a winning strategy for […]
I already mentioned R for dummies a while ago on the ‘Og and never got around to read it from cover to back. Now that I am reduced to a dummy state with too much free time!, I can produce a full review of the book. R for dummies was written by two Belgian statistics […]
