A summer of books
The summer started with a research in pair session in CiRM on the R edition of Bayesian Core, but I am also involved two other book projects. The first one was mentioned in a previous post, namely the translation of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R into French. I have now recovered all translated chapters, involving not less than six translators! (My son completed his two last chapters while in CiRM, another benefit of the fortnight there!) So I need to get over those chapters to ensure some minimal homogeneity in the style and the notations. Not an immense amount of work given the near perfect productions of Robin Ryder, Julyan Arbel and Pierre Jacob, but still needs to be done (a per
fect opportunity for the long flight to Vancouver!) The second book is an edited volume following the exciting meeting on mixtures last March in Edinburgh. I have so far received twelve of the fifteen chapters from the contributors and hope against all odds to pack the volume for Vancouver, in order to discuss with the Wiley representative there. (I also hope it will be possible to include a picture I took during my trip to Ben Nevis as the cover picture..!)
Xi'an's Og 
July 11, 2011 at 12:13 am
[…] Paris and Montpellier, and running too many projects at once with Jean-Michel (including the Bayesian Core revision that did not move much since last summer!), we came to realise that my earlier strong stance that […]
November 16, 2010 at 12:07 am
[…] I will not discuss here Chapter 4, “a diversion from the main theme of the book” (page 91), except to criticise the use of Haldane’s prior (which does not allow for empty cells in a contingency table) and for the corresponding (mathematically false) semantic switch reproduced above. Similarly, Chapter 7 “points out difficulties with the posterior predictive distribution” (page 172) that I refrain from addressing here (namely, that the predictive lacks variability, page 173), despite some puzzling statements like the one that a marginal distribution (meaning density) being “the mean of the conditional distribution, (…) there is more information about this distribution in the variance of the conditional distribution averaged over X” (page 176). (For one thing, not every density is L2, hence square-integrable…) Chapter 8 covers mixtures of distributions and relates to our (critical) 2006 Bayesian Analysis paper on DIC, bur does not end up as critical despite the variety of DIC criteria. (This part on mixture is also related to a chapter Murray Aitkin contributed to our volume on mixtures.) […]
September 23, 2010 at 8:45 am
[…] revision is completed. We hope to be done by next summer, even though the simultaneous handling of three other books will certainly be a liability for […]
July 31, 2010 at 6:20 am
[…] was packed, which means I could not even open my macbook… So I looked instead at the translation of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R into French, read the Economist from start till end, and […]