capture & maybe recapture

I read population size estimation with capture-recapture in presence of individual misidentification and low recapture arXived by Rémy Fraysse and coauthors on my flight back from Saigon. The setup is one of a capture-recapture experience where potential misidentification (of a r … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 8 months ago

differentially private distributed Bayesian linear regression with MCMC

An ICML 2023 paper by Barıs¸ Alparslan, Sinan Yıldırım¸ and Ilker Birbil that (re)addresses the issue of privacy when running a Bayesian regression analysis. Resorting to the common notion of differential privacy, imposing a limited variability if a single observation is modified … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 8 months ago

Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #4 [23w5106]

Mostly short talks. First talk by Thomas Seinke (Google) on interpreting ε, with a side wondering of mine on the relation between exp(ε) and the uncertainty that comes with Monte Carlo outcome. Which may relate to this 2022 paper by Ruobin Gong. Second talk by Gautam Kamath (U Wa … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 9 months ago

Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #0 [23w5106]

The Banff International Research Station will host the “Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy” workshop at the UBC Okanagan campus in Kelowna, B.C., from July 30 to August 4, 2023. Privacy concerns are becoming a major obstacle to using data, and it is often unclear how c … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 9 months ago

what is the caption?!

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@xianblog.wordpress.com | 9 months ago

a journal of the conquest, war, famine, and death year

Read Les chiens et la charrue (Le cycle de Syffe, tome 3 ) by Patrick K. Dewdney, which came out after a long hiatus (esp. when missing the parution in September 2021!). It thus proved hard to remember the complex structure of this universe, as well as the names of characters fro … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 10 months ago

нет войнe

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@xianblog.wordpress.com | 10 months ago

webscussion on Bayesian causality

Today, I attended (most of) and briefly took part in the discussion webinar run by Bayesian Analysis (the journal) and featuring the paper Causal Inference Under Mis-Specification: Adjustment Based on the Propensity Score by David Stephens, Widemberg Nobre, Erica Moodie, and Alex … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 11 months ago

statistical modeling with R [book review]

Statistical Modeling with R (A dual frequentist and Bayesian approach for life scientists) is a recent book written by Pablo Inchausti, from Uruguay. In a highly personal and congenial style (witness the preface), with references to (fiction) books that enticed me to buy them. Th … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 11 months ago

uniform spacings

A riddle on uniform spacings!, namely when considering eight iid Uniform (0,1) variates as visiting times and three further iid Uniform (0,1) variates as server availability times, with unit service time, the question being the probability a server is available for a ninth visiti … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 11 months ago

fusing simulation with data science [18-19 July 2023]

In collaboration with the Met Office, my friend and Warwick colleague Rito Dutta is co-organising a two-day workshop in Warwick in July on the use of statistics and machine learning tools in weather prediction. Attendance is free, but registration needed for tea breaks. | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 11 months ago

reciprocal importance sampling

In a recent arXival, Metodiev et al. (including my friend Adrian Raftery, who is spending the academic year in Paris) proposed a new version of reciprocal importance sampling, expanding the proposal we made with Darren Wraith (2009) of using a Uniform over an HPD region. It is ca … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 11 months ago

Italy no-no’s

The Lonely Planet blog has a list of prohibitions on tourists’ activities when visiting some Italian cities. Like Venice, Rome or Milan (below). Most of which is sort of obvious, like not walking around shirtless or barefoot away from beaches, feed the pigeons (although our kids … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 12 months ago

grasshoppers for pythons

Following my earlier post on the terrible performances of ChatGPT for a grasshopping riddle, Bob Carpenter sent me his interaction with GPT4, using the same entry. Here is the python code outcome he obtained. The code is running  and the answer is correct. BC: Thanks. Can you wri … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

Kimono exhibition

Taking advantage of the 01 May break and a relatively low density of people in Paris, we went to the Musée du Quai Branly to see a soon to close exhibit on kimonos, with many pieces loaned from Japanese collections, through an exhibit designed by the Victoria and Albert Museum in … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

powering a probability [a Bernoulli factory tale]

Starting from an X validated question on finding an unbiased estimator of an integral raised to a non-integer power, I came across a somewhat interesting Bernoulli factory solution! Thanks to Peter Occil’s encyclopedic record of cases, pointing out to Mendo’s (2019) solution for … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

religions in the classroom

Two recent stories reported in the New York Times about U.S. professors being fired for posting art pieces that students or parents found offensive to their beliefs. One (above) was a painting within a 14th-century Islamic history book supposed to represent G and M. As showed [wi … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

Number savvy [book review]

“This book aspires to contribute to overall numeracy through a tour de force presentation of the production, use, and evolution of data.” Number Savvy: From the Invention of Numbers to the Future of Data is written by George Sciadas, a  statistician working at Statistics Canada. … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

stops making sense [cover

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@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

another round of mostly useless road death statistics [and a terrible graph]

Another terrible report on (French) road accidents and deaths Le Monde pointed to. The entire analysis does not consider once the number of people on the roads or the death per kilometer ratio. Which makes the absolute figures as those represented in this ugly graph hard to comme … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year

Read over the last week of 2022 and in the plane to India, three books by Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor and both volumes of The Cemeteries of Amalo. While the steampunk side is very light, the universe is rather well-conceived and the stories compelling, esp. the duology … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

the incredible shrinking pools

I was reading an opinion piece in The Guardian about the sorry state of public pools in England. With more and more closing for lack of proper funding, this being aggravated by the explosion in heating costs, as pools are excluded from governmental help. And the resulting impact … | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

fat tire [jatp]

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@xianblog.wordpress.com | 1 year ago

The R Inferno: A Review

Thanks to my answering a (basic) question on X validated involving an R code, R mistakes and some misunderstanding about Bayesian hierarchical modelling, I got pointed out to Patrick Burns’ T… | Continue reading


@xianblog.wordpress.com | 2 years ago