# Posts Tagged ‘ books ’

## an inverse permutation test

September 22, 2016
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A straightforward but probabilistic riddle this week in the Riddler, which is to find the expected order of integer i when the sequence {1,2,…,n} is partitioned at random into two sets, A and B, each of which is then sorted before both sets are merged. For instance, if {1,2,3,4} is divided in A={1,4} and B={2,3}, […]

## astroABC: ABC SMC sampler for cosmological parameter estimation

September 5, 2016
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“…the chosen statistic needs to be a so-called sufficient statistic in that any information about the parameter of interest which is contained in the data, is also contained in the summary statistic.” Elise Jenningsa and Maeve Madigan arXived a paper on a new Python code they developed for implementing ABC-SMC, towards astronomy or rather cosmology […]

## Matlab goes deep [learning]

September 5, 2016
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A most interesting link I got when reading Le Monde, about MatLab proposing deep learning tools…Filed under: Books, pictures, R, Statistics, University life Tagged: deep learning, Le Monde, Matlab

## Bayesian Essentials with R [book review]

July 27, 2016
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[A review of Bayesian Essentials that appeared in Technometrics two weeks ago, with the first author being rechristened Jean-Michael!] “Overall this book is a very helpful and useful introduction to Bayesian methods of data analysis. I found the use of R, the code in the book, and the companion R package, bayess, to be helpful […]

## Extending R

July 12, 2016
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As I was previously unaware of this book coming up, my surprise and excitement were both extreme when I received it from CRC Press a few weeks ago! John Chambers, one of the fathers of S, precursor of R, had just published a book about extending R. It covers some reflections of the author on […]

## another wrong entry

June 26, 2016
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Quite a coincidence! I just came across another bug in Lynch’s (2007) book, Introduction to Applied Bayesian Statistics and Estimation for Social Scientists. Already discussed here and on X validated. While working with one participant to the post-ISBA softshop, we were looking for efficient approaches to simulating correlation matrices and came [by Google] across the […]

## data challenge in Sardinia

June 9, 2016
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In what I hope is the first occurrence of a new part of ISBA conferences, Booking.com is launching a data challenge at ISBA 2016 next week. The prize being a trip to take part in their monthly hackathon. In Amsterdam. It would be terrific if our Bayesian conferences, including BayesComp, could gather enough data and […]

## Le Monde puzzle [#964]

June 1, 2016
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A not so enticing Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Find the minimal value of a five digit number divided by the sum of its digits. This can formalised as finding the minimum of N/(a+b+c+d+e) when N writes abcde. And solved by brute force. Using a rough approach to finding the digits of a five-digit number, the […]

## the random variable that was always less than its mean…

May 29, 2016
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Although this is far from a paradox when realising why the phenomenon occurs, it took me a few lines to understand why the empirical average of a log-normal sample is apparently a biased estimator of its mean. And why conversely the biased plug-in estimator does not appear to present a bias. To illustrate this “paradox” […]

## another riddle with a stopping rule

May 26, 2016
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$another riddle with a stopping rule$

A puzzle on The Riddler last week that is rather similar to an earlier one. Given the probability (1/2,1/3,1/6) on {1,2,3}, what is the mean of the number N of draws to see all possible outcomes and what is the average number of 1’s in those draws? The second question is straightforward, as the proportions […]