## [Royal] Series B’log

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , on September 12, 2016 by xi'an

[Thanks to Ingmar for suggesting the additional Royal!]

Last week, I got an email from Piotr Fryzlewicz on behalf of the Publication Committee of the Royal Statistical Society enquiring about my interest in becoming a blog associate editor for Series B! Although it does not come exactly as a surprise, as I had previously heard about this interest in creating a dedicated blog, this is great news as I think a lively blog can only enhance the visibility and impact of papers published in Series B and hence increase the influence of Series B. Being quite excited by this on-line and interactive extension to the journal, I have accepted the proposal and we are now working on designing the new blog (Series B’log!) to get it on track as quickly as possible.

Suggestions towards this experiment are most welcome! I am thinking of involving authors to write blog summaries of their paper, AEs and reviewers to voice their expert opinions about the paper, anonymously or not, and of course anyone interested in commenting the paper. The idea is to turn (almost) all papers into on-line Read Papers, with hopefully the backup of authors through their interactions with the commentators. I certainly do not intend to launch discussions on each and every paper, betting on the AEs or referees to share their impressions. And if a paper ends up being un-discussed, this may prove enough of an incentive for some. (Someone asked me if we intended to discuss rejected papers as well. This is an interesting concept, but not to be considered at the moment!)

## no country for ‘Og snaps?!

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags , , , , , , on August 30, 2015 by xi'an

A few days ago, I got an anonymous comment complaining about my tendency to post pictures “no one is interested in” on the ‘Og and suggesting I moved them to another electronic media like Twitter or Instagram as to avoid readers having to sort through the blog entries for statistics related ones, to separate the wheat from the chaff… While my first reaction was (unsurprisingly) one of irritation, a more constructive one is to point out to all (un)interested readers that they can always subscribe by RSS to the Statistics category (and skip the chaff), just like R bloggers only post my R related entries. Now, if more ‘Og’s readers find the presumably increasing flow of pictures a nuisance, just let me know and I will try to curb this avalanche of pixels… Not certain that I succeed, though!

## je suis Avijit Roy

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on February 27, 2015 by xi'an

## je suis Raif

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on January 19, 2015 by xi'an

## 2014 in review

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , on January 2, 2015 by xi'an

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for the ‘Og…

.. and among the collected statistics for 2014, what I found most amazing are the three accesses from Greenland and the one access from Afghanistan!

Click here to see the complete report. (Assuming you have nothing better to do on Boxing day…)

## that the median cannot be a sufficient statistic

Posted in Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on November 14, 2014 by xi'an

When reading an entry on The Chemical Statistician that a sample median could often be a choice for a sufficient statistic, it attracted my attention as I had never thought a median could be sufficient. After thinking a wee bit more about it, and even posting a question on cross validated, but getting no immediate answer, I came to the conclusion that medians (and other quantiles) cannot be sufficient statistics for arbitrary (large enough) sample sizes (a condition that excludes the obvious cases of one & two observations where the sample median equals the sample mean).

In the case when the support of the distribution does not depend on the unknown parameter θ, we can invoke the Darmois-Pitman-Koopman theorem, namely that the density of the observations is necessarily of the exponential family form,

$\exp\{ \theta T(x) - \psi(\theta) \}h(x)$

to conclude that, if the natural sufficient statistic

$S=\sum_{i=1}^n T(x_i)$

is minimal sufficient, then the median is a function of S, which is impossible since modifying an extreme in the n>2 observations modifies S but not the median.

In the other case when the support does depend on the unknown parameter θ, we can consider the case when

$f(x|\theta) = h(x) \mathbb{I}_{A_\theta}(x) \tau(\theta)$

where the set indexed by θ is the support of f. In that case, the factorisation theorem implies that

$\prod_{i=1}^n \mathbb{I}_{A_\theta}(x_i)$

is a 0-1 function of the sample median. Adding a further observation y⁰ which does not modify the median then leads to a contradiction since it may be in or outside the support set.

Incidentally, if an aside, when looking for examples, I played with the distribution

$\dfrac{1}{2}\mathfrak{U}(0,\theta)+\dfrac{1}{2}\mathfrak{U}(\theta,1)$

which has θ as its theoretical median if not mean. In this example, not only the sample median is not sufficient (the only sufficient statistic is the order statistic and rightly so since the support is fixed and the distributions not in an exponential family), but the MLE is also different from the sample median. Here is an example with n=30 observations, the sienna bar being the sample median: