# Posts Tagged ‘ books ’

## an express riddle

January 19, 2017
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$an express riddle$

A quick puzzle on The Riddler this week that enjoys a quick solution once one writes it out. The core of the puzzle is about finding the average number of draws one need to empty a population of size T if each draw is uniform over the remaining number of individuals between one and the […]

## weakly informative reparameterisations for location-scale mixtures

January 18, 2017
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We have been working towards a revision of our reparameterisation paper for quite a while now and too advantage of Kate Lee visiting Paris this fortnight to make a final round: we have now arXived (and submitted) the new version. The major change against the earlier version is the extension of the approach to a […]

## truncated normal algorithms

January 3, 2017
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Nicolas Chopin (CREST) just posted an entry on Statisfaction about the comparison of truncated Normal algorithms run by Alan Rogers, from the University of Utah. Nicolas wrote a paper in Statistics and Computing about a simulation method, which proposes a Ziggurat type of algorithm for this purpose, and which I do not remember reading, thanks […]

## Books on Scala for statistical computing and data science

December 22, 2016
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Introduction People regularly ask me about books and other resources for getting started with Scala for statistical computing and data science. This post will focus on books, but it’s worth briefly noting that there are a number of other resources available, on-line and otherwise, that are also worth considering. I particularly like the Coursera course … Continue reading Books on Scala for statistical computing and data science

## puzzled by harmony [not!]

December 12, 2016
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In answering yet another question on X validated about the numerical approximation of the marginal likelihood, I suggested using an harmonic mean estimate as a simple but worthless solution based on an MCMC posterior sample. This was on a toy example with a uniform prior on (0,π) and a “likelihood” equal to sin(θ) [really a […]

## ratio-of-uniforms [-1]

December 11, 2016
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Luca Martino pointed out to me my own and forgotten review of a 2012 paper of his, “On the Generalized Ratio of Uniforms as a Combination of Transformed Rejection and Extended Inverse of Density Sampling” that obviously discusses a generalised version of Kinderman and Monahan’s (1977) ratio-of-uniform method. And further points out the earlier 1991 paper […]

## flea circus

December 7, 2016
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An old riddle found on X validated asking for Monte Carlo resolution  but originally given on Project Euler: A 30×30 grid of squares contains 30² fleas, initially one flea per square. When a bell is rung, each flea jumps to an adjacent square at random. What is the expected number of unoccupied squares after 50 […]

## ratio-of-uniforms [#4]

December 1, 2016
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Possibly the last post on random number generation by Kinderman and Monahan’s (1977) ratio-of-uniform method. After fiddling with the Gamma(a,1) distribution when a<1 for a while, I indeed figured out a way to produce a bounded set with this method: considering an arbitrary cdf Φ with corresponding pdf φ, the uniform distribution on the set […]

## sampling by exhaustion

November 24, 2016
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The riddle set by The Riddler of last week sums up as follows: Within a population of size N, each individual in the population independently selects another individual. All individuals selected at least once are removed and the process iterates until one or zero individual is left. What is the probability that there is zero […]

## Monty Python generator

November 22, 2016
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By some piece of luck I came across a paper by the late George Marsaglia, genial contributor to the field of simulation, and Wai Wan Tang, entitled The Monty Python method for generating random variables. As shown by the below illustration, the concept is to flip the piece H outside the rectangle back inside the […]