reading classics (The End)

Today was the final session of our Reading Classics Seminar for the academic year 2014-2015. I have not reported on this seminar much so far because it has had starting problems, namely hardly any student present on the first classes and therefore several re-starts until we reached a small group of interested students. And this is truly The End for this enjoyable experiment as this is the final year for my TSI Master at Paris-Dauphine, as it will become integrated within the new MASH Master next year.

As a last presentation for the entire series, my student picked John Skilling’s Nested Sampling, not that it was in my list of “classics”, but he had worked on the paper in a summer project and was thus reasonably fluent with the topic. As he did a good enough job (!), here are his slides.

Some of the questions that came to me during the talk were on how to run nested sampling sequentially, both in the data and in the number of simulated points, and on incorporating more deterministic moves in order to remove some of the Monte Carlo variability. I was about to ask about (!) the Hamiltonian version of nested sampling but then he mentioned his last summer internship on this very topic! I also realised during that talk that the formula (for positive random variables)

does not require absolute continuity of the distribution F.