# Posts Tagged ‘ books ’

## ABC random forests for Bayesian parameter inference

May 19, 2016
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Before leaving Helsinki, we arXived [from the Air France lounge!] the paper Jean-Michel presented on Monday at ABCruise in Helsinki. This paper summarises the experiments Louis conducted over the past months to assess the great performances of a random forest regression approach to ABC parameter inference. Thus validating in this experimental sense the use of […]

## Using MCMC output to efficiently estimate Bayes factors

May 18, 2016
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$Using MCMC output to efficiently estimate Bayes factors$

As I was checking for software to answer a query on X validated about generic Bayes factor derivation, I came across an R software called BayesFactor, which only applies in regression settings and relies on the Savage-Dickey representation of the Bayes factor when the null hypothesis writes as θ=θ⁰ (and possibly additional nuisance parameters with […]

## reversible chain[saw] massacre

May 15, 2016
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A paper in Nature this week that uses reversible-jump MCMC, phylogenetic trees, and Bayes factors. And that looks at institutionalised or ritual murders in Austronesian cultures. How better can it get?! “by applying Bayesian phylogenetic methods (…) we find strong support for models in which human sacrifice stabilizes social stratification once stratification has arisen, and […]

## a Simpson paradox of sorts

May 5, 2016
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The riddle from The Riddler this week is about finding an undirected graph with N nodes and no isolated node such that the number of nodes with more connections than the average of their neighbours is maximal. A representation of a connected graph is through a matrix X of zeros and ones, on which one […]

## an integer programming riddle

April 20, 2016
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A puzzle on The Riddler this week that ends up as a standard integer programming problem. Removing the little story around the question, it boils down to optimise 200a+100b+50c+25d under the constraints 400a+400b+150c+50d≤1000, b≤a, a≤1, c≤8, d≤4, and (a,b,c,d) all non-negative integers. My first attempt was a brute force R code since there are only […]

## Le Monde puzzle [#958]

April 10, 2016
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A knapsack Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Given n packages weighting each at most 5.8kg for a total weight of 300kg, is it always possible to allocate these packages  to 12 separate boxes weighting at most 30kg each? weighting at most 29kg each? This can be checked by brute force using the following R code and […]

## Statistical rethinking [book review]

April 5, 2016
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Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan is a new book by Richard McElreath that CRC Press sent me for review in CHANCE. While the book was already discussed on Andrew’s blog three months ago, and [rightly so!] enthusiastically recommended by Rasmus Bååth on Amazon, here are the reasons why I […]

## another riddle

March 28, 2016
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A very nice puzzle on The Riddler last week that kept me busy on train and plane rides, runs and even in between over the weekend. The core of the puzzle is about finding the optimal procedure to select k guesses about the value of a uniformly random integer x in {a,a+1,…,b}, given that each […]

## Le Monde puzzle [#952]

March 18, 2016
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A quite simple Le Monde mathematical puzzle again with Alice and Bob: In a multiple choice questionnaire with 50 questions, Alice gets a score s such that Bob can guess how many correct (+5 points), incorrect (-1 point) and missing (0 point) Alice got when adding that Alice could not have gotten s-2 or s+2. […]

## Le Monde puzzle [#952]

March 18, 2016
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A quite simple Le Monde mathematical puzzle again with Alice and Bob: In a multiple choice questionnaire with 50 questions, Alice gets a score s such that Bob can guess how many correct (+5 points), incorrect (-1 point) and missing (0 point) Alice got when adding that Alice could not have gotten s-2 or s+2. […]