![fine-sliced Poisson [a.k.a. sashimi]](http://xianblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/slisson2.jpg?w=450&h=450)
As my student Kévin Guimard had not mailed me his own Poisson slice sampler of a Poisson distribution, I could not tell why the code was not working! My earlier post prompted him to do so and a somewhat optimised version is given below: As you can easily check by running the code, it does […]
One of my students complained that his slice sampler of a Poisson distribution was not working when following the instructions in Monte Carlo Statistical Methods (Exercise 8.5). This puzzled me during my early morning run and I checked on my way back, even before attacking the fresh baguette I had brought from the bakery… The […]
With the Sochi Winter Olympics now well underway, I was reminded of the empirical literature that has attempted to model the number of medals that different countries win.Back in 2006, one of our students, Glen Roberts, wrote an excellent paper, titled...
Introduction Today, I will discuss the alpha decay of americium-241 and use R to model the number of emissions from a real data set with the Poisson distribution. I was especially intrigued in learning about the use of Am-241 in smoke detectors, and I will elaborate on this clever application. I will then use the Pearson chi-squared […]
I spotted on R-bloggers a post discussing optimising the efficiency of programming accept-reject algorithms. While it is about SAS programming, and apparently supported by the SAS company, there are two interesting features with this discussion. The first one is about avoiding the dreaded loop in accept-reject algorithms. For instance, taking the case of the truncated-at-one [...]
