Art Owen has arXived a new version of his thinning MCMC paper, where he studies how thinning or subsampling can improve computing time in MCMC chains. I remember quite well the message set by Mark Berliner and Steve MacEachern in an early 1990’s paper that subsampling was always increasing the variance of the resulting estimators. […]
I’ve recently delivered a three-day intensive short-course on Scala for statistical computing and data science. The course seemed to go well, and the experience has convinced me that Scala should be used a lot more by statisticians and data scientists for a range of problems in statistical computing. In particular, the simplicity of writing fast … Continue reading Statistical computing with Scala free on-line course
Introduction This weekend I’ve been preparing some material for my upcoming Scala for statistical computing short course. As part of the course, I thought it would be useful to walk through how to think about and structure MCMC codes, and in particular, how to think about MCMC algorithms as infinite streams of state. This material … Continue reading MCMC as a Stream
A recent question on X validated ended up being quite interesting! The model under consideration is made of parallel Markov chains on a finite state space, all with the same Markov transition matrix, M, which turns into a hidden Markov model when the only summary available is the number of chains in a given state […]
A recent question on X validated ended up being quite interesting! The model under consideration is made of parallel Markov chains on a finite state space, all with the same Markov transition matrix, M, which turns into a hidden Markov model when the only summary available is the number of chains in a given state […]
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 […]
In a previous post, we demonstrated that ridge regression (a form of regularized linear regression that attempts to shrink the beta coefficients toward zero) can be super-effective at combating overfitting and lead to a greatly more generalizable model. This approach… Continue reading →
A week ago, I received a request for refereeing a paper for the Journal of Open Source Software, which I have never seen (or heard of) before. The concept is quite interesting with a scope much broader than statistical computing (as I do not know anyone in the board and no-one there seems affiliated with […]
Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) Haven’t dumped much code here in a while. Here’s a Julia implementation of MALA with an arbitrary preconditioning matrix M. Potentially I might use this in the future. Generic Julia Implementation Arguments are a function to evaluate the logdensity, function to evaluate the gradient, a step size h, a preconditioning […] The post MALA – Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm in Julia appeared first on I've…
Introduction Many modern algorithms in computational Bayesian statistics have at their heart a particle filter or some other sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) procedure. In this blog I’ve discussed particle MCMC algorithms which use a particle filter in the inner-loop in order to compute a (noisy, unbiased) estimate of the marginal likelihood of the data. These … Continue reading A scalable particle filter in Scala
