“…likelihood inference is in a fundamental way more complicated than the classical method of moments.” Carlos Amendola, Mathias Drton, and Bernd Sturmfels arXived a paper this Friday on “maximum likelihood estimates for Gaussian mixtures are transcendental”. By which they mean that trying to solve the five likelihood equations for a two-component Gaussian mixture does not […]
I am currently preparing a survey paper on the present state of computational statistics, reflecting on the massive evolution of the field since my early Monte Carlo simulations on an Apple //e, which would take a few days to return a curve of approximate expected squared error losses… It seems to me that MCMC is […]
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 […]
